See Thru Specs - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Put the glasses on! PUT 'EM ON!"

Roddy Piper, They Live!

The world is the way it is. Or so they would have you believe. But there is something more, something underneath the thin skin of this world, something which can't be normally seen by human eyes. How can you see it then? Why, with special glasses, of course.

These can come in a variety of forms: regular sunglasses, x-ray specs ordered from the back of a comic book, hagstones, or even special amulets. You can see By The Eyes Of The Blind, those Invisible To Normals, you can even see the Masquerade. You've broken the Weirdness Censor on your eyes.

Now, the only question is: is this a good thing?

Despite what the title may imply, this has nothing to do with X-Ray Vision. Compare with the Goggles Do Something Unusual.

Examples:

In The Spiderwick Chronicles, the main human characters have to look through a hole in a stone (also called a hagstone or adder stone, in the books, a "seeing stone") to see the fairy creatures when they don't want to be seen.
The movie They Live is built around this trope: the main character played by Roddy Piper finds a box of sunglasses and when he puts one on, he can see the hidden aliens among them, as well as signs saying "Consume," "Marry and Reproduce," and money printed with "This is your God" on it.
In Mega Man Star Force, Geo Stelar has the Visualizer, a pair of glasses that lets him see the wave world
The Life And Times Of Juniper Lee uses a magical amulet instead of glasses, but the effect remains the same.
The Lens of Truth in The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is purported to see through illusions (or really just to reveal hidden shit).
Dungeons And Dragons has a spell called True Seeing which allows you to see through any illusions or glamors placed on an object. In theory, it is possible to enchant any object with True Seeing, including glasses, other clothing items, and even light sources (sort of like an anti-illusion field).
In Doctor Who "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday," the Doctor wears a pair of 3-D glasses designed to see the residual void stuff.
In Piers Anthony's Incarnations Of Immortality novel With a Tangled Skein, there is a pair of glasses that allows the wearer to actually see the wages of sin people are piling on themselves in ~~Purgatory~~ Hell. Satan was trying to get people into Hell on the installment plan: for each level, you had to sacrifice 1% of your good. (There are hundreds of levels.) These looked tempting to live people and Incarnations without the glasses; with them, not so much.
The Are You Afraid Of The Dark episode "Tale of the Super Specs," partially inspired by They Live.
Tabletop RPG example: The Call Of Cthulhu adventure "The Fungi From Yuggoth." It had a pair of spectacles that allowed the wearer to see into another dimension (with the usual impossible angles and bizarre perspectives). Each time you used them, there was a chance you could see a monster that could attack and kill you if you didn't take them off in time.
- Which is basically a man-portable version of the Tillinghast Resonator from HP Lovecraft's story "From Beyond".
This is one of the mechanics in the Nintendo game Bart vs. the Space Mutants - you get a pair of x-ray specs, and when you use them you can see which people are possessed by the space mutants.
The hole-in-a-stone variation also appears in Neil Gaiman's Coraline, where the heroine used one to find the souls of the other children.
Hagstones, also called "serpent's eggs" and "witch stones," were said to protect against the evil eye and prevent nightmares and cure whooping cough.
On the pseudo-scientific side, ecto-goggles allowed the Ghostbusters to detect invisible ghosts and other psycho-kinetic anomalies visually. They turn up in the film, the sequel, and much of the spinoff media. There was even a toy◊.
The Silph scope in the first Pokemon games. It allowed to see the real form of wild ghost Pokemon.
The opening of Men In Black: The Animated Series shows a special visor that lets you see if someone is an alien in disguise.
Shingetsutan Tsukihime reverses this one with special glasses that hide the "lines of death".
Cowboy Bebop has HUD glasses that let you see if someone has a bounty on his head.
William Sleator's The Boy Who Reversed Himself had a set of glasses created by four-dimensional creatures that allowed you to see around clothes (and everything else) by giving you 4D vision, somehow.
Vivian Vande Velde's Now You See It...
In the book Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, Oculators can use special glasses to detect, among other things, footprints, powerful magic items, and other Oculators.
In the Robert Sheckley short story Is That What People Do?, a man ends up with a pair of half-functional binoculars which let him peep in a series of bizarre scenes which may or may not be happening. In the end he looks in the other end of the binoculars, and sees a pair of enormous eyes, one of which winks at him.
The Stephen King short story "The Ten O'Clock People" has the Weirdness Censor become broken by, of all things, moderate smoking. For some reason the chemicals in cigarettes let people see thru the monsters' disguises, but only if you ingest them at a rate somewhere between "smoke occasionally" and "chain smoking."
In The Phantom Tollbooth Milo is given a magical spyglass that allows him to see things as they really are.
Much gameplay in Splinter Cell revolves around using your military-grade goggles at opportune points. Night vision is easily explained away—otherwise you'd be playing a black screen half the time. But Thermal vision that lets you see landmines? "Electromagnetic" vision that conveniently reveals only equipment that you can interact with?
In Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Johan Strauss obtains eyewear that enables the BPRD team to see through magical beings' glamour.
- Including that of Hellboy himself. Even though he isn't really using a glamour as he physically ripped his horns off and filed them down.
The gozarian glasses in The Middleman allow people to see (but not hear) ghosts.
One episode of Reaper has Sam get a pair of glasses which will supposedly allow him to see the true forms of demons. This effect has not been shown, though.
The first storyline of webcomic Veena has the title character find shades that let her see ghosts.
Rather than actual glasses, witches in the Discworld can enter Faerie by "opening their eyes, and then opening them again."
In the episode "Germs", Invader Zim bought a pair of goggles that allowed him to see the (normally invisibly tiny) teeming masses of bacteria covering everything and everyone. They even came in a holographic trial version.
The original movie Thirteen Ghosts in 1960 used special glasses to see the ghosts. Ditto for the remake, Thir13en Ghosts in 2001.
The Robert Bloch short story "The Cheaters" features glasses that let you read people's minds. Being a Robert Bloch story, it doesn't end well.
In the Star Trek Voyager episode "Scientific Method", the Doctor figures out there are invisible aliens on the ship and modifies Seven's Borg eye implant to detect them. When she opens her eyes again, she can see the aliens — everywhere. And they're doing horrible things to the crew...
For Your Height Only (1981) the Filipino James Bond spoof, has the midget secret agent hero equipped with see-through glasses that he uses to check out some secretaries naked and see a couple of villains (also shown naked) hiding behind the curtains.
The premise of Flashback is that you created special glasses that allowed you to see the density of objects. As you walked around with them on, you noticed that some people were much heavier than they should be...
Franken Fran took this trope and applied it to a pair of eyes that the title character created and implanted in a painter. The eyes allowed him to see light and color spectrums that normal humans couldn't see. Unfortunately, this caused him to see all sorts of Eldritch Abomination that are usually invisible to humans.
Larkin's scope in Gaunt's Ghosts explicitly functions this way on at least one occasion (seeing through a psychic illusion caused by some Eldar) and in a less literal sense in genera - Larkin is somewhat unhinged, and it's mentioned that he sees things clearly only when he's looking through his scope.
Myths of The Fair Folk sometimes feature magical ointments which, rubbed on one's eyelids, allow one to see the faerie. One common scenario is when a man accidentally splashes some of this substance on one of his eyes, then is deprived of it — the eye, not the ointment — by an irate fey who dislikes being observed.