Why is it so difficult to choose a pair of glasses? After all they are just a couple of lenses, ocular devices to make your life a bit easier, a couple of pieces of glass worked and shaped to help your eyes focus better. But they are so much more than this. Glasses that are designed to help you look have ended up being designed to give you a look. No longer is it a question of how well can you see but it is now a question of how you want to be seen.
We have long passed the need just to correct our vision. That is the easy bit, relatively; the grinding and polishing of glass to meet a prescription will soon sort that out and fastening them in a frame to allow them to sit on your face will do the business.
The hard part is deciding the look that you want to portray, the image that you want to live up to or the persona that you want to adopt. Glasses can define a character and it is the decision behind that character that makes choosing glasses so time consuming. Who do you want to be, a player in Mad Men, Dame Edna, Hercules Poirot, Harry Potter or just yourself? Glasses can make you studious, whacky, caring, bookish, old fashioned, out of date, rich, poor, scatter brained and you have to make a choice as to which of these you want to become. I’m afraid that they can even make you look unloved.
And it’s not just in the opticians where you have a problem, even trying to buy a pair of ready made reading glasses from a supermarket display is fraught with anxiety. Do these frames fit my face, are they the right shape for my head, does the colour go with my outfit, are they even men’s glasses? You are faced with so much choice; round lenses, square lenses, coloured frames, black frames, heavy frames or even frameless, metal frames, tortoise shell, varifocals, bifocals, reading glasses, distance glasses, not to mention dark glass, tinted glass or reactive glass. It just goes on and on. No wonder your head spins and you need to take a friend to give you a second opinion and keep you on the straight and narrow. Just make sure that they have the same vision of your character that you have mind you or you could come back from the shops as the kind of person that you never wanted to be.
Having choice is a great things but I dread the time that I can no longer focus or the leg has dropped off my current frames and it is time to choose whether I am still the person that I would like others to see.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 