How Glasses Shape Your Identity

Jamie Clarke (he/him)

If our eyes are the window to the soul, then you better make sure you’ve got some stylish frames for them. Whether you begrudgingly wore your glasses that your parents hand-picked for you to school every day, or rocked your colourful frames with pride, those of us who have been plagued with less-than-perfect eyesight from a young age often have a complicated relationship with our eyewear. If you’ve recently been told you’re joining the shit-eyesight club, welcome to the confusing hell that is picking out your first pair of glasses. You’ve probably never looked at your face with as much scrutiny before. Do you suit square frames? Circular frames? Clear frames? Rainbow frames? And what the fuck is your face shape? 

People who wear glasses don’t exactly get a great rap in the media. This isn’t a sob-story for us glasses-wearers—it’s really not something to cry about (that would fog up our lenses). Caring about how you look in glasses, and how other people think you look, is of course a superficial problem. But, we do live in a society where our appearance affects every aspect of our lives, from the personal to the professional. Glasses are almost exclusively portrayed in movies as the personification of nerdiness—they signal to the viewer that this character is smart, thinks they’re smart, or is trying their best to look smart. As my anonymous flatmate aptly put it, “I need them to see but I feel like a nerd”. With a culture that has forced the simple act of seeing into a personality trait, it should come as no surprise that our eyewear of choice can often feel like a core part of our identity.

Not to mention those vomit-inducing, misogynistic makeover movies where the girl takes her glasses off, lets her hair down and *BAM*, she’s gone from unfuckable geek to heart throb just like that. A fellow bespectacled student, Eiréann, told me that while she usually rocks her glasses, when she’s next to someone whose opinion on her appearance is valuable to her, she feels self-conscious. Unfortunately, but sadly not unsurprisingly, she’s been told in the past by a random man that she looks “so much better” without her (extremely stylish) spectacles. It’s not all doom and gloom though, she adds: 

“Maybe I do look better without my glasses, but I still like them. I am still holding onto the childhood joy of wearing my first pair of proper glasses, and now I get to have funky frames. They act as a form of self-expression, with their exciting colours and bizarre shapes.” So, whether it’s trying to look clever, ‘cool’, or stylish, glasses are so much more than just pieces of plastic and glass that help us see. 

Buying glasses can be a particularly stressful experience, despite those who are employed to help make it as smooth as possible. No matter which way you look at it, it is impossible to escape the fact that whenever you enter a store to buy glasses, you are entering a retail space that’s interests are, by definition, in conflict with the necessary medical service it provides—stores have retail targets, and the eyewear industry is huge. 

Salient spoke with Laura, a fifth year student who described how this crossover can be particularly jarring from a customer perspective. She highlighted that upon entering a glasses store she had one person, the optician, telling her that she needed glasses from a medical standpoint. She then had a retail assistant in the same store encouraging her to drop $450 on a pair. “I knew I needed the glasses to see better, I’d been falling asleep in class and getting headaches all the time, but I got so stressed in the store. I ended up with baaad buyer's remorse and a sad bank account” Laura said.  “I wish I’d gone in a bit more prepared with what I wanted.” She was, overall, happy to be able to see properly again. 

Salient also spoke with an optical assistant, who is a student at Vic too, about being a part of the industry. When asked what glasses are on trend at the moment, she told us that “tortoise shell never goes out of fashion”, with slim cat eye, and big and round being the current shapes of choice. A mix of wire and plastic are the in-style materials. As someone wearing a pair of glasses with plastic, tortoise shell frames and wire legs, I must say she has a great sense of taste. Aligning with current trends can be an important way to feel as if your glasses don’t make you look like a nerd, or at least to help prevent you from feeling out of place. 

She “loves [her] job,” as she gets to help people feel less concerned about the often stressful process of getting glasses. “I think it’s nice to be able to help, particularly older people, understand how glasses are going to correct their vision. Oftentimes they come out of the exam room understanding that their vision is worse and having heard the optometrist’s recommendations for correction but not knowing what that actually means.” 

“It’s definitely nice to be able to break down exactly what progressive lenses means, or why they are being booked in for a visual field [...] and how it will help them. The same goes for people with first time glasses. Having a chat makes it less scary I guess.”

There are no public optician services in Aotearoa, and so the eyewear industry does provide an essential service for those in need of visual aids. For the many of us whose poor vision is a relatively mild inconvenience, forking up money for a pair of specs can seem like an annoying, but relatively optional, additional cost. But, for the majority of the 150,000 New Zealanders with moderate to severe vision loss, access to glasses is a necessity. When vision loss affects your ability to live your life independently and, say, drive, or be able to get the bus, or walk to the shops, the cost of purchasing them shifts from a pain in the ass to another essential bill that many can’t afford. While Work and Income do provide some financial assistance for those 16 and over on very low incomes, this is a loan. Because that’s what those struggling financially need more of—debt. The only way you can get “free” government money for glasses is by being 15 or under and having a high use health card, or have a parent with a valid community services card (in addition to meeting strict clinical guidelines). 

Whether you wear glasses out of necessity, or simply for the vibe they give off, it’s undeniable that they influence how we see ourselves, and how others perceive us. The very first impression you get of someone—at a job interview, or in a uni tut, or on Tinder—is almost always based on their face. Our faces are at the heart of our appearance, and how we present our emotions to others. So whether we like it or not, glasses provide a glimpse of who we are. This sense of identity, however, is underpinned by the fact that glasses are visual aids that many people need. While we are sometimes encouraged in a retail space to forget about functionality and think about fashionability in order to spend more, we should not be forgetting that glasses are fundamentally a medical aid.