Abstract Absence of a clear eye visibility not only degrades the aesthetic value of an entire face image but also creates dif- fificulties in many computer vision tasks. Even mild reflflections produce the undesired superpositions of visual information, whose decomposition into the background and re- flflection layers using a single image is a highly ill-posed problem. In this work, we enforce the tight constraints derived by thoroughly analysing the properties of an eyeglass reflflection. In addition, our strategy regularizes gradients of the reflflection layer to be highly sparse and proposes the facial symmetry prior via formulating a non-convex optimization scheme, which removes the reflflections within a few iterations. Experiments on frontal face image inputs demonstrate the high quality reflflection removal results and improvement of the iris detection rate