Glasses « The Outer Hoard

Glasses

Everyone in my immediate family wears glasses of one sort or another. Dad and Rebecca wear permanent glasses, Mum wears reading glasses for close-up work, and I have a pair that I use when I want to see something in the distance.

I’m slightly short-sighted. I find glasses useful when watching television, scanning items on a supermarket shelf, reading a menu on a restaurant wall, watching a performance on stage, admiring a beautiful view, and other things like that. But I’ve had them for a few years now and they still give me a mild headache if I leave them on for too long, so I only wear them when necessary. If I’m watching television, for example, they come off in the commercials.

Here’s a picture of me with my glasses on. Notice the style that I chose, because I think I chose it well, aesthetically. The colour is a nice, neutral brown, and the shape of the lenses is not too rounded, not too square.

Sunglasses, now. I’ve never been a big fan of them, partly because of that social connotation of trying to look “cool” in the most shallow, image-cloning sense of the word. I don’t want to walk down the street looking like the action guy from some movie, and most sunglasses (the popular models) feel like they’re at best obscuring, and at worst clashing with, my identity. And yet I have to acknowledge that the other side - you know, that bit about protecting one’s eyes - makes a sort of sense.

The solution is to choose a style that is more individualistic than most, that better reflects one’s own aesthetic tastes, and is hardly ever worn in the movies. Personally, I like the style where the lenses are attached to the frame along the top and by the nose, but there is no frame underneath the eyes or down their outer side. The curves need to be a pleasing shape, too, to suit the way I trim my beard. Here is me wearing my current pair: