As soon as somebody figured out how to hang glasses on a nose, some else denounced the idea. God gave us the eyes we deserve, and who are we to defy God? Amazingly, an English monk was imprisoned for coming up with two, quarter-sized pieces of rock-crystal. Englishman Roger Bacon applied Arab and Persian scholarship to show how lenses could bend light to compensate for near and far-sighted vision. Sometimes called “the first scientist,” Bacon was sentenced to seven years in a miserable medieval cell for saying he could “fix” God’s creations by using lenses to see. The Church disagreed. By the time he was finally released, someone in Italy had just invented a pair. But who did it, and where? To this day, no one knows who invented spectacles. Because of Church opposition, no one dared admit it. 

I’m someone who couldn’t cross the street without glasses. I decided to cast them aside to see as people did before glasses, and to test what it means to see on my own. I had the expected results: accidents small and large, injuries, and isolation (both visual and personal). Maybe it was a crazy idea—cooking on a stove I couldn’t see clearly, for example. Yet the very near-sighted can see at least a little. We’re not likely to mistake the pantry door for the garage and end up with a motor-oil omelet. I was still able to read a book or newspaper held inches away from my face, listen to the radio, play with my phone. It was still me, just lost in a blur.

Today, more folks are wearing glasses earlier in life and for longer than ever; nearly half of young adults in the United States and Europe are now nearsighted—double the percentage half a century ago. Nature notes that sixty years ago, the percentage of Chinese youth who wore glasses was 10–20 percent; today it’s up to 90 percent. Australian researchers found a simple, free way to retard myopia: “The more time children spent playing outdoors, the less likely they were to have short-sightedness.” When a child spends time outside during the day, retinal dopamine is released into the bloodstream, which inhibits the elongation of the eyeball that causes myopia.

If you’re reading this with glass or plastic between you and the page or screen, you’re a member of a 200 million-person community. You’re a “glasser.” Hey, that’s better than “four eyes,” a name thrown at people with weak ones. According to Webster, that’s a term expressing contempt or dislike for someone “physically weak, unlikely to engage in physical activity.” This disdain is nothing new: Prejudice against those needing visual correction began as soon as glasses were invented and continues to this day in different forms. Many who wore glasses growing up have never stopped to consider how this bias affected their development and personality.

Anyone wondering how serious anti-glasses bullying can be should know about a family whose child committed suicide after the Mr. Magoo film. In 1997, a bright-eyed African American woman was worried about her stepson, Musa. Though she didn’t know it, the boy faced taunts and beatings at school for his glasses. “The first we knew the full extent of his agony was when we discovered his body.”

In November 2021, in New Orleans, an eighth-grader lived in constant torment at school. “It’s her glasses,” her mother insisted. While her mother was out grocery shopping, the thirteen-year-old found a gun.

In May 2024, a fourth-grader in Greenfield, Indiana, was watching his big brother play soccer. The phone kept ringing with threats from bullies. His parents had complained to school authorities. Sammy loved his glasses; he’d picked out nice frames. But when he returned from wearing them for the first time, kids had broken them and beat him up. “I’m never wearing those things again.” He couldn’t take it anymore. After his death, his father kept his broken glasses as a memorial shrine.Why, in the 2020s, does glasses-shame persist? These days, nearly everyone wears vision aids if they live long enough.

For centuries, women and girls have been told eyeglasses make them unattractive and might drive away men. As humorist Dorothy Parker wrote: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” Things have changed, but a century ago, wearing glasses was a “bit like brandishing your wooden leg in public,” according to one newspaper. Fashion frames today allow more choices. Today, 16 million people wear frames with clear lenses, as an accessory. Have prejudices against women in glasses ended? Yes and no. Until just three years ago, women could be fired in Japan for wearing glasses to work. In Korea, female TV anchors aren’t allowed to wear them. Not too long ago, in the film Wonder Woman, the star was given glasses with clear lenses and told “that way you’ll look less pretty.”

There’s a lot of science on how glasses-wearers are judged, positively and negatively. They’re supposed to be trustworthy and smart (from all that book-reading), but unsocial, awkward, maybe unattractive, or introverted. Study after study repeat this, even recently. But sometimes it’s not whether one wears glasses but how one wears them. Are the frames distinctly unflattering? Are they whole, askew, or chipped? (Some glasses worked well with a wearer’s face; others seemed to wage war on it.)

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality glasses are “smart,” because they’re computer and phone-enabled. AR glasses overlay a transplant, computer-generated hologram on or above your lenses by using minicameras to survey surroundings and pea-sized projectors to shoot these images to the inside of a glasses lens. AR glasses can lay a schematic over an engine or instructions to assemble furniture. You can watch a movie in your glasses or read your emails. Because they don’t block out light, augmented reality glasses have less nausea (but less immersion) than do virtual reality glasses.

At best, smart glasses may be a social good, helping builders, firefighters—anyone needing to work hands-free. AI smart glasses could help an Alzheimer’s patient find his way home. (They might even help you find your keys.) At worst, smart glasses may someday reveal a lot more about you than you’d like.

It would creepy if someone could check your credit score or marital status on their smart glasses. Will smart glasses with cameras reshape our public sphere into a goldfish bowl, by introducing a world of crowdsourced surveillance? On phones with earpieces in, people already seem to be talking to themselves. Soon, your glasses will do the listening, and record what you hear and see. In self-defense, we may end up buying them to learn who that guy is on the corner, eyeing us intently with his glasses.

The cost of prescription eye-wear has three parts: service, frames, and lenses. Services are the examination and the fitting that adjust a pair of glasses to their wearer. Better-trained and more experienced providers charge more. It’s the near monopoly of frame and lens-makers that’s exploding the price of eyewear. In the world today, 1.4 billion glassers wear a product that comes from one company, Essilor-Luxottica. Talk about concentration of ownership!

The fundamental questions which everyone I talk to asks: “Why should a few dollars of plastic cost hundreds of dollars?” The answer is complicated. Eyeglasses are (or should be) precision goods. That frame goes through 200 steps in its manufacture. There are patents to pay for. But glass is not a precious stone, people say. But that’s like saying, “Cotton is cotton, so why should a shirt cost $100?” You’re paying for design, patents, fabrication, R&D, and the tools that go into manufacturing those lenses.

What I look for in a pair of glasses is what’s visible: the frames. They should feel sturdy, with largish hinges, frames that don’t wobble, and of course lenses held securely. Most important: ones that let me see well.

Glasses stereotypes show up in movies—nerds, geeks, mad scientists, and librarians aching to peel off their glasses and let down their hair. Mr. Magoo was the patron fall-guy of spectacle-wearers. In ads, he appeared in oversized black glasses, which framed his face like a death notice. His problem was that he rarely wore them, so he was a walking disaster movie: power lines fell, buildings tumbled. Even today, many associate him with those who don’t see well. Yet the message can be contradictory: both Nazis and Santa Claus wear wire-rims. Librarians in lenses are kind, but also naughty and sexy. In close-ups on the big screen, glasses are considered unsexy, even on Marilyn Monroe in a strapless evening gown.

When eyewear first began to appear, a whiff of sulfur or mystery hung over it; if glasses helped people see, what other powers might they possess? Besides sharpening vision, writers have imagined glasses revealing secrets, allowing 3D vision, performing magic. Part of the benefit glasses brought to literature is their visibility. The New York Times once called glasses more public than underwear, because we wear them outside.

In fiction, glasses do far more than let people see; they pierce hypocrisy, allow wearers to read people’s thoughts. They helped Sherlock Holmes solve a case and appear in Shakespeare, Dickens, Aldous Huxley, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Post-Harry Potter, prejudice has slowed.