Purely Aesthetic Glasses

aka: The Glasses Do Nothing

She looks good and sees good!

"You don't even need them! You just think they make you look a bit clever."

— The Tenth Doctor to the Fifth Doctor, Doctor Who, "Time Crash"

Usually, only people with vision problems go to the trouble of getting a pair of glasses. But sometimes, we have a character who dons a pair of spectacles even though they have perfect eyesight. The Purely Aesthetic Glasses are just there to make the character look smart, sophisticated, scary, sexy and/or cute. However, whether they really do make the wearer smart, sophisticated, and cute is variable. Another possibility is wearing glasses as part of a disguise, to impersonate a glasses-wearing person, or simply as a bit of facial concealment.

See also: Glasses Curiosity and Goggles Do Nothing. Contrast Universal Eyeglasses, where the glasses do correct eyesight, but work for anyone, regardless of prescription.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• A McDonald's commercial shows two men, wearing glasses and sitting at an intellectual coffee shop, somehow found out that McDonald's also serves coffee. They immediately rebel against the pseudo-intellectual front they had been putting up to get their coffee, and yes, one of them was pulling this trope. The other one was not.

Anime & Manga

• Angel Beats!: Takamatsu wears a pair of these. However, it is noted almost immediately that despite the specs, he's still an idiot.
• Firo of Baccano! takes to wearing a pair of these from 1970 onwards after he replaces Maiza as the camorra's conta è oro. When asked about them, he admits that they're just there to make him look smarter.
• Ayakashi Triangle: Garaku normally wears glasses, which have actual glass lenses, but don't seem to do anything, given he's a humanoid spirit. He's shown without them in flashbacks to his "youth" (as much as he had one), and Garaku once took them off for a fight without losing any visual ability.
• Azuma from Bamboo Blade got herself (fake) glasses in the hopes that they would help improve her marks.
• On Black Lagoon, a kidnapped rich boy is rescued by his family's unstoppable gun-wielding Ninja Maid, Roberta, who reveals herself to have once been a Cuban assassin and international terrorist named Rosalita Cisneros. As she's been loaded, very injured, into a car, she asks the boy to get her (broken) glasses from the ground. He's confused because he knows she doesn't actually need them to see.
  "Those glasses help me believe I'm her. I just want to be your Roberta."
• Case Closed:
  • Conan Edogawa has big round glasses for the aesthetic effect of looking less like himself; he's been de-aged into a child and is living day-to-day with a Childhood Friend whom he does not want to recognize him, and Shinichi never wore glasses. He's Clark Kenting, but he doesn't have the luxury of changing back and forth at will. They also make him look cuter, which he exploits. He also gets some cool features built into them as time passes, chiefly that they contain the monitor system for his little electronic trackers.
  • When he first grabs a pair in the anime, he punches out the lenses in them so he can actually see, as they originally belonged to someone else, presumably his father, who does need them. Curiously, none of the characters notice the lack of lenses...
• Haruka of Castle Town Dandelion wears these to school.
• Played for Laughs in Chainsaw Man when during their Training from Hell, Idiot Heroes Denji & Power attempt to invoke Smart People Wear Glasses by donning pairs in an attempt to become smarter. For a brief moment it seemingly works.
• It's implied in Chrono Crusade that neither Aion or Shader need their glasses. In Shader's case she's probably wearing them because it makes her look brainy, in Aion's case it might be that, or it might be to make him look more intimidating. In Aion's case, they're probably also there to hide from the audience that Chrono and Aion are identical twins.
• An unanimated chapter of Daily Lives of High School Boys revealed that Hidenori has 40/20 vision without his Stoic Spectacles.
• In D.N.Angel, Satoshi doesn't actually need his glasses and admits it to people when they ask. However, it's implied they might function as a way to hold back his alter-ego, Krad.
• The disguise variety shows up in Doraemon: Nobita's the Legend of the Sun King, a Prince and Pauper-style story where Nobita exchange places with Prince Tio, a prince of an alternate universe who's somehow an Identical Stranger to Nobita, save for absence of glasses. Doraemon simply took out one of Nobita's old specs, removes the lens, and voila.
• Ninamori wore lensless glasses over contacts during the school play in FLCL, instead of just wearing normal glasses, because she doesn't want the other students to know she has imperfect vision. It's explained in the commentary for the episode she has fine eyesight and the glasses are just something she worked into the play (and wore in front of Naota) because they made her look more grown up. The events of her spotlight episode made her realize that she could still have fun as a kid, recognized when she told him they were fake at the very end.
• Dr. Ramune: Mysterious Disease Specialist has Takaharu, a seemingly dorky bespectacled high-schooler who is actually a Bishōnen and is wearing the thick, unpleasant-looking frames in order to hide his good looks so that he wouldn't outshine his best friend, Bungou.
• The final arc of Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Super, and Dragon Ball GT has Gohan wearing glasses along with his civilian clothing. Since he does not wear glasses when he dons his gi and also takes them off when engaging in battle otherwise, his eyesight seems to be just as fine as before. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, however, reveals that Gohan really is nearsighted without his glasses, causing Piccolo to wonder if going Super Saiyan fixes his eyesight.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Riza Hawkeye uses this when she engages in Clark Kenting.
• Ayane Isuzu in Gate Keepers 21 doesn't need them, but wears them because she has a complex regarding her parents and her identity.
• When the master assassin Golgo 13 needs to infiltrate a chemical warfare lab by posing as a skilled chemist, his disguise consists of... a pair of glasses. It's arguable whether they make him look smarter, but they actually DO make him look less intimidating somehow, which is an accomplishment in itself, considering his face.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers:
  • Though people read into it for different reasons, America doesn't need his glasses. They represent Texas (rather, he puts them on after annexing Texas) but really seem to exist solely for looking cuter.
  • Something similar happens with Team Dad Austria, who's said via Word of God to feel that he looks plain; from a symbolic standpoint, the glasses supposedly represent his music (as something that makes him interesting).
• It's My Life (Imomushi Narita): Zigzagged with Elise. Her eyesight is fine, but she wears glasses to change the colour of her silver irises to make herself look less conspicuous when she's traveling. However, the additional notes mention that she continues to wear her glasses at home because she just likes them.
• Kanamori from Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! always has her eyeglasses sitting atop her head, but is almost never seen wearing them. Instead using them as, in one instance, a hair-tie. The one time we do see her wearing them, she's asleep.
• Miu from Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple wears these to make herself stand out less, and although she's still a head-turner, she's not as much of one. When she finally ditches them and decides to be more open, it does not go unnoticed.
• Love Stage!!: Rei has perfect vision - he wears glasses because without them he is incredibly attractive and he doesn't like the attention.
• Dentaku, of Lychee Light Club. Suitably, his epithet is "Science Boy".
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: As shown in the last episodes, Quattro doesn't need her glasses. She just has them to help keep up her façade of innocent cuteness.
  • Nove is also shown wearing reading glasses in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid, even though she (like Quattro) has cybernetically enhanced eyes.
• MEGANEBU!, where glasses-wearing is enforced:
  • In a show about the Bishōnen guys in a High School "Glasses Wearers Club," the member Hayato Kimata has 20/20 vision and wears glasses for show, he just really likes them and wants to be a member of the club. He had to actually beg to be allowed into the club too.
  • On the other end, Akira's brother Hikaru is blind, yet he's wearing clear, normal-looking glasses.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Evangeline would put these on whenever she wants to look more teacher-like before Negi and everyone else training under her.
  • Chisame uses her glasses to hide behind, as she doesn't like to stand out too much. Her vision is actually better than average.
• One Piece:
  • Nami wears a pair of glasses while lecturing the rest of the crew on what they'd learned at Sky Island since arriving. These glasses had never appeared before and only once since.
  • In the Alabasta Arc, Sanji wears them for his "Mr. Prince" persona.
  • In the tenth movie, Strong World, Robin sports a pair of eyeglasses for most of the film.
• A common feature of the Human Alien heroines in the Onegai franchise. In Please Teacher! Mizuho's glasses serve mainly as a signal that she's in teacher mode; she doesn't wear them whenever she's being domestic with Kei. Ichika's glasses in Waiting in the Summer serve both as a disguise and as a head-up display interface for her alien hardware. Neither of them wears glasses aboard their spaceships.
• Oshitari Yuushi from The Prince of Tennis. He's so used to wear his glasses that at one point, he eventually forgets they are non-functional lenses when he sees Inui has his own glasses broken in a match and asks Atobe if he should lend Inui his glasses.
• In Reborn! (2004), Gokudera Hayato acquires a pair of glasses halfway through the series for no apparent reason, aside from the fact that they make him look even cuter. Well, he does seem to use them whenever he reads things. When studying Sistema CAI, when teaching Tsuna to swim, when trying to learn how to properly cook... Looks like it can be deduced that Gokudera has a little vision problem when it comes to reading things up close. He seems to have no problem in school without his glasses, however. He doesn't care about school, though.
• In Sailor Moon, both Ami (Sailor Mercury) and Mamoru (Tuxedo Mask) have been shown wearing "reading glasses" on occasion. Neither of them actually need them. Mamoru, however does have the excuse that they are (initially) part of his disguise, as he was already operating as Tuxedo Mask at the start of the series.
• Jin from Samurai Champloo wears anachronistically-fashionable glasses which are completely pointless, expressly for the purpose of looking sophisticated.
• Switch in Sket Dance actually wears these. He began wearing them in order to emulate his deceased younger brother.
• In one chapter of Squid Girl, the titular protagonist becomes convinced that wearing glasses automatically makes one smarter, since Smart People Wear Glasses, and wears a pair of fake glasses to improve her intelligence. It doesn't work, as expected; though as Sanae can attest, it does make her look cuter than usual.
• Kurabayashi Hal from Switch (2002) actually has 20/20 vision but he wears glasses to emulate his father.
• In Sword Art Online, Shino Asada actually has exceptional vision, but wears glasses made from bulletproof material as a Security Blanket — she has an intense phobia of guns after killing a bank robber during a Gun Struggle when she was eleven.
• Ginnosuke from Tokyo Underground wears thick Nerd Glasses, but whenever he loses them, he has no trouble functioning — he assembled his first spirit gun without them (requiring him to scavenge for parts in a junkyard), and even fights better. He's also surprisingly handsome without glasses, a fact made clear by not a few girls. He still puts them back on when he can.
• Used by Poplar while studying for a test in Wagnaria!!

Asian Animation

• BoBoiBoy: It is confirmed ^note in replies to fanmail in monthly magazines that both Ying and Fang's reasons behind wearing glasses are one and the same; not because they have vision impairments, but because they think they look cool.

Comic Books

• Alpha Flight: Jeanne-Marie Beaubier a.k.a. Aurora wore fake glasses when assuming the persona of a straight-laced schoolteacher.
• Batman: As a psychiatrist/psychologist, Harley Quinn wore glasses. It's never clarified why she wore them, besides Smart People Wear Glasses. She ditched the glasses after becoming a villain and doesn't even wear them when in civilian clothes. There's no mention of her wearing contacts either.
• Motu Patlu: In all incarnations, Patlu wears glasses but does not have any eye problems that would actually warrant wearing them. The glasses are probably just there to establish that Patlu is much smarter than his Dumb Muscle friend, Motu.
• The Phantom: The Phantom almost always wears glasses or shades whenever he's not wearing his regular mask and costume. The same goes for all predecessors down the line (as a Legacy Character, The Phantom has a 400-year-long history) and as none have had particularly bad vision, they've just used fake glasses. Justified in-universe by a legend saying that "Whoever sees the eyes of the phantom must die". Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, as even the Phantom himself has wondered about how criminals who get a look under his mask tend to have fatal accidents shortly after.
• Robin: Tim started wearing glasses and doing his hair differently after his father's attempts to get him out of Gotham during Batman: No Man's Land left him getting constant comments in the line of, "Hey, aren't you that Tim Drake kid?" since his face was all over the news just to cut down on the unwanted attention.
• Spider-Man: Some versions claim that Peter Parker never needed glasses at all, but his Aunt May feared he would strain his eyes by reading without them. They were broken in an early strip, and after that, he has never worn them again. The gag shows up again every couple of years, where after seeing something supernatural/incredible, Peter will muse that maybe he needs to go back to wearing glasses.
• Superman: Clark Kent, of course, whose glasses mainly serve as his disguise. In some versions, his glasses do have something special about them. Supergirl and Superboy sometimes wear glasses for similar reasons.
• Yellow Submarine: The Beatles visit a Penny Lane barber in Gold Key Comics' adaptation. The barber kits John with a pair of glasses (the round rims he usually wears), saying it will give him character.
  Paul: How can you give that character character?

Fanfiction

• As part of one of her disguises to hide from her fans in BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant, Pyrrha dons a pair of glasses without lenses.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità: Japan only wore hexagonal glasses with his Teru Mikami cosplay; he doesn't actually need them.
• In DAYDverse, Terry Boot had these when he was younger, to appear intelligent so the Sorting Hat would put him in Ravenclaw.
• Guys Being Dudes: Arlo's glasses don't correct his vision and it's suggested by Spark that he might just wear them to look more intimidating, but they do have other purposes including Augmented Reality and obscuring his voice when he's doing Pokestop takeovers.
• Eridan in Moiraillegiance is Science is a deconstruction; his glasses used to be this trope, but since he wore them practically all the time it actually screwed up his vision to the point where he's Blind Without 'Em. And all because Feferi said he looked cute wearing them.
• Tales of the Undiscovered Swords: Sasanoyuki gains a pair of rectangular specs after his kiwame training which doesn't seem to serve any other purpose than to make him look scarier.
• In Turnabout Storm, Sonata eventually admits that she doesn't need glasses, and wears them because they stop others from easily reading her emotions through her eyes.
• Angela Castle, the UNIT scientific advisor in The Road to Shalka wears these to give herself an air of professionalism (she's really insecure). Thanks to some Epiphany Therapy from a certain harsh Time Lord, she gives them up in the end.
• RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse:
  • Princess Luna occasionally wears a pair of glasses when working in private. She doesn't need them, but she finds it helps her focus (she really hates paperwork). Shining Armor is alarmed to find that it makes her look astoundingly cute.
  • During The Hero of Oaton, Raindrops winds up wearing a pair of glasses, which she doesn't need. They've been magically enchanted so she can read the surface thoughts of those around her. A lesbian pony she runs into thinks they make her look astoundingly cute, too.

Films — Animation

• In Turning Red, the 4*Town themed glasses seen on the concertgoers apparently serve purely to declare which one of the band members is the wearer's favourite.

Film — Live-Action

• In Captain Marvel (2019), Talos, impersonating S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Keller, comments to Fury that he doesn't actually need to wear the director's glasses, but he likes them and they complete the look.
• Subversion: In Charade, Regina (Audrey Hepburn) accuses Peter (Cary Grant) of not needing the reading glasses he puts on. She pulls them from his face and dons them herself — then gets a shocked expression and quickly hands them back, saying quietly, "You need them." Evidently, the degree of correction in those lenses was something fierce.
• In Doctor at Large, Joy wears glasses to her medical final, only so she will appear smarter.
• Played straight in High School Musical with Kelsi, completely averted with every other character in the movie.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005): Tricia "Trillian" MacMillan, in her first scene has a pair of glasses to flag her character as clued-in.
• In Gremlins 2: The New Batch, the smart gremlin obtains a set of glasses from an unknown source the moment it acquires intelligence.
• In (Untitled) (yes, that's its name, parentheses and all), gallery owner Madeleine Gray has a whole collection of fake glasses she wears to look more sophisticated and hip, and she tries her hardest to prevent anyone from discovering that they're just for show.
• Joe wears glasses as part of the wealthy bachelor disguise he puts on to seduce Sugar in Some Like It Hot.
• This tends to be common in porn. Few, if any, porn stars wear glasses, and if they do, it's only to either establish the theme of the scene (usually school or hospital settings) or to enhance the Money Shot (and in many cases the glasses are either lensless or removed a few minutes after the scene starts.)
• In A Fairly Odd Christmas, Crocker confessed he only wears glasses to look smart.
• Ghostbusters (2016): Kevin, the protagonists' handsome, ditzy secretary, wears glasses, but he took out the lenses because he kept having to clean them. Being a tremendous Cloudcuckoolander, it's anyone's guess whether they were purely aesthetic before he did that, or they were prescription and he just hadn't realized.
• Jurassic Park:
  • In the first film, Ellie Sattler has a pair on for a portion of the film (upon first arriving at the visitor center, watching the raptors feeding, and then the lunch table discussion). She doesn't wear them at any other point before or afterwards, nor in the sequels.
  • In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Franklin and Zia both wear glasses but eventually lose them in the midst of all the action. Neither has any problem seeing things without them, though.

Literature

• Imzadi by Peter David. Mary Mac, a female Orion administrator of a Federation science post, dresses in a rather dowdy manner (loose-fitting clothes, functional braids, and large glasses) to avoid being seen as just another Green-Skinned Space Babe. Ironically, glasses are rare in Picard's time (or even Kirk's), as future medicine has other means of correcting eyesight.
• Harriet the Spy wears a pair of lens-less frames as part of her spy gear and sometimes to school because she thinks they make her look smarter.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Yuki Nagato's glasses seem to be simply an aesthetic feature. After they get destroyed in a fight, Kyon tells her she's cuter without them and she doesn't bother recreating them. She uses glasses for "magical" purposes in some novels (such as Disappearance) but they don't correct her vision. However, her alternate universe counterpart in the manga spinoff The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan does need glasses and is Blind Without 'Em.
• In one essay in Scott Adams' book Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!, he writes about how to appear smart. The first and most important tip he gives is to wear glasses, even if you don't need them.
• Referenced in Skinned. Due to everyone being a Designer Baby, flaws such as poor eyesight are a thing of the past. Lia mentions that there was once an old-fashioned glasses fad, though it passed.
• Several of the characters in American Psycho wear "nonprescription" name-brand glasses purely out of yuppie fashion.
• In Divergent, Caleb Prior's vision is fine. He wears glasses to look more Erudite.
• Myrna Minkoff wore fake eyeglasses in A Confederacy of Dunces.
• Discworld: Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal wears these during his days as a conman. He has such a bland face, he will wear something like glasses, hats, clothes, put on an accent, and other false facades so people remember that aspect of his person and not anything about his real physical build.
• Reborn as a Space Mercenary: I Woke Up Piloting the Strongest Starship!: Mei is a maidroid, so when Hiro designs her appearance he includes a pair of glasses that serve no purpose than looking pretty.

Live-Action TV

• On 30 Rock, Liz Lemon wears glasses most of the time, despite Jenna pointing out that she doesn't actually need them. This is a case of Truth in Television: Tina Fey, who modeled the character of Liz on herself, has said many times that she only needed glasses to read the cue cards on SNL but continued to wear them off the show because they unintentionally had become her trademark.
• In an episode of Better Off Ted, Lem reveals that he has been doing this for the past ten years to make him appear smarter.
• In The Big Bang Theory, Penny gets jealous when one of Leonard's coworkers hits on him. To compensate for the fact that the other girl is very intelligent, Penny gets glasses so she can look smart. It works QUITE well on Leonard.
  • Look carefully and you'll see that Leonard's glasses throughout the entire series have no lenses. It was an affectation put in by Johnny Galecki personally for the character.
• The 2009 edition of Big Fat Quiz of the Year had Jonathan Ross use this as a form of psychological warfare to intimidate/impress the other panelists. It...doesn't really work.
  David Mitchell: I can tell that there's no glass in those glasses, which immediately makes me think you're a spy working for a poor country.
• In Black Mirror's "San Junipero", Kelly asks Yorkie if she actually needs her glasses and she admits she doesn't; she wore them when she was younger and no longer needs them but feels that they're her trademark look. She doesn't need them because she's a consciousness in a computer simulation.
• Bunk'd: Tiffany Chen always wears glasses when around her strict mother, despite not needing them, because her mother claims, "If your eyes aren't ruined, you're not reading enough." She advises the girls to wear them to make Camp Kikiwaka appear as a camp for geniuses.
• Charmed (2018): When Mel's girlfriend Nico accidentally gets dosed with truth serum, one of her admissions is that she doesn't need her glasses; she only wears them to be taken seriously. While she doesn't consciously remember what happened while she was dosed, she does ditch the glasses from then on. When Mel rewrites history to protect Nico from demons, since the above incident never happened, Nico starts wearing the glasses again. After a personal crisis, she stops again.
• In Class (2016), one of the things that makes Ms. Quill suspicious of the school inspector is that he wears glasses with no curvature to the lenses. He turns out to be a robot.
• Britta on Community starts wearing these at the end of season 3; Jeff also toys with the idea.
  • Exaggerated in a season 4 Imagine Spot sequence where all the main characters except Abed and Jeff are seen wearing them.
• Maya in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend doesn't need glasses, but wears an enormous pair solely in order to honor Velma from Scooby-Doo. (Although since she technically says this in a sequence being fantasised by another character, she might need them in real life; nevertheless, this trope is invoked.)
• Inverted on Criminal Minds, when Penelope briefly wears contacts in an attempt to look more serious.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • Out of universe, Charlie Cox isn't blind, so the pair of red-lens sunglasses he wears to play Matt Murdock are this. In-universe, Matt wears the glasses for the same reason every other blind person wears them: because not wearing them would weird people out regarding his unfocused non-seeing eyes. That said, when he's in the privacy of his apartment, or just around those who are used to his unfocused eyes, like Foggy, Karen, Claire, or Elektra, he'll generally have his glasses off.
  • It's unclear whether or not James Wesley actually needs glasses. He wears them in the majority of his scenes, where they make him look more sociopathic, but there are a couple occasions where he's talking one-on-one with Fisk where he takes them off and he doesn't appear to be squinting.
• Doctor Who:
  • The First Doctor had both a pair of Edwardian-style glasses and a monocle that he would occasionally take out when he was trying to look extra clever. The monocle would pop up more often due to him wearing it around his neck as part of his costume in some stories — the glasses show up more rarely but are prominent in "An Unearthly Child", including during his first encounter with Ian and Barbara. In at least one scene ("The Rescue"), the Doctor uses both his glasses and his monocle at the same time to study a spiral-bound notebook.
  • The Fourth Doctor has a pair of very small-lensed, dark-tinted glasses which he occasionally wears while tinkering with scientific equipment, inspired by 1930s horror movie Mad Scientists. He also has a black Jeweler's Eye Loupe which he sometimes uses legitimately, but sometimes wears wedged in his eye socket like a monocle, possibly to free up his hands.
  • The mini-episode "Time Crash", where the Doctor teases his own past self for wearing glasses he doesn't need in order to look "a bit clever". Ironically, the Tenth Doctor himself is practically infamous for his use of the brainy specs and later admits his hypocrisy, "Snap!" The fact that the Doctor has worn them in not only their fifth and tenth incarnations but also, at least once in a Tie-In Novel, their eighth, which were their youngest-looking incarnations before Eleven, rather suggests the Doctor might not really need them and just wears them for the extra gravitas. Out of universe, David Tennant (the Tenth Doctor) has said that he wanted to have his Doctor frequently wearing glasses in order to give glasses-wearing kids a heroic role model (ironic, considering that he played an enemy of another hero with glasses).
    • They did once do something; in "Planet of the Dead", when stranded on a desert planet that looked suspiciously like somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula and the Classy Cat-Burglar donned her own regular sunglasses, Ten sonic'd his Purely Aesthetic Glasses into tinted sunglasses.
    • Interestingly, the 2018 novelization of "The Christmas Invasion" indicates that Ten's glasses aren't purely aesthetic after all, suggesting that he's actually slightly farsighted.
  • Eleven has broken out the Brainy Specs on occasion, although they weren't purely aesthetic. The first time, he used a heat vision feature (no, not that kind of heat vision) to try to track Silurians, and the next, he sonicked them and gave them to Rory so Rory could see Amy in two different time periods.
  • In a non-comedic example, the Eleventh Doctor took to wearing reading glasses in series 7. They're actually Amy Pond's reading glasses, and he hangs onto them as a Tragic Keepsake. Played with in that while he doesn't actually need them, he comments that they actually do make reading easier.
• Subverted on Dollhouse: in the first episode Topher explains that Echo really does need glasses when she's imprinted with the Miss Penn personality, even though she normally doesn't. The way he sees it, little weaknesses like that are important features that help give the personae their strengths.
• In one episode of Even Stevens, Donny watches a video on how to appear smarter. One of the video's suggestions is to wear glasses (Also, to use big words like "cornucopia, meaning 'bountiful' or 'a lot of'"). When Donny notices a reporter is likewise wearing pointless glasses, he realizes she's not as smart as Ren thinks she is.
• In The Flash (2014), Eobard Thawne apparently doesn't actually need the glasses he wears while disguised as Harrison Wells, as he takes them off whenever he is alone and ditches them permanently when his true identity is revealed.
• Played for Laughs on Haven, when newcomer Jennifer can't decide whether or not to wear glasses to her interview at the Haven Herald in order to be seen as more competent. She asks another employee, who tells her that Dave prefers them, while Vince doesn't, so she spends the interview taking them on and off depending on which brother she's looking at.
• On How I Met Your Mother, in the flashback in "Arrivederci, Fiero", it's shown that Ted wore spectacles. When they accidentally break, however, he says they were merely "decorative".
• In an episode of Knight Rider, an undercover Michael Knight wears glasses as part of a disguise leading to his cover being blown when a suspicious person looks through them and realises they are just window glass.
• In The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Ilya does seem to legitimately need reading glasses, but he's also been seen putting them on in order to pose as a doctor or scientist on short notice.
• NCIS: This trope is Michael Weatherly's personal Hand Wave for his glasses showing up a few times in the first season. Tony, his character, is supposed to have 20/10 vision.
• New Girl
  • Jess wears glasses that clearly have no lenses. It might be this trope, but it's more likely an issue with the prop.
  • An actual example is Elvin, who suggests to Winston (who wishes to appear smarter) that he start wearing fake glasses. Elvin says it worked for him.
• NTSF:SD:SUV::: Summer Glau appears as a "fake nerd girl" wearing oversized Nerd Glasses. While she tries to seduce Agent Trent Hauser, he tells her he isn't fooled by her non-prescription glasses.
• Ryan on The Office (US) wears these when he adopts a more hipster-ish persona.
• Our Miss Brooks: In "Living Statues", it's revealed that Mr. Conklin claims he wears glasses merely to "lend dignity to his appearance". In fact, he's Blind Without Them.
• Ami in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon. She claims she feels awkward without them.
• Red Dwarf: Rimmer dons specs in the episode "Holoship" after illegally enhancing his intelligence with a mind patch.
• Hugh Laurie, when hosting Saturday Night Live, was supposed to put on glasses at one point during a sketch, to make his character look smarter. Since he fumbled the Glasses Pull and couldn't get them on quickly, he just ad-libbed, "Never mind, they're just an affectation."
• Scrubs:
  • In an early episode, Elliot is seen with a pair of glasses that disappears without explanation and never comes back. In the commentary, the writers noted that Sarah Chalke wore them because she thought it would make the character seem smarter.
  • Another episode, about how the hospital's night staff are even weirder than the day staff, has a receptionist who is seen rubbing her eyes through her glasses, and later pushing them up by hooking a pencil through them. There are no lenses at all.
• A plot point on Lebanese Soap Opera The Storm Rages Twice. In this case, Nader's secretary Haifa uses them. When she accidentally leaves them on her desk, Nader deduces that their lack of correction means that ex-wife Jamal hired her to spy on him (and through that, the same applies to his daughter's live-in maid Enaam). He's absolutely correct in both cases. Of course, this is nothing unusual here.
• Spike Milligan in There's a Lot of It About:
  Doctor: Why do your glasses have no lenses?
  Spike: Because I have perfect eyesight, Doctor.
• In the future depicted in Star Trek, medical advances would seem to make glasses a relic of the past. Despite this, season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery (which takes place in 3189) introduces a man named Kovich who wears glasses. Why?
  Kovich: They make me look smart. I like them.
• Supergirl: Kara is originally given her glasses to help deal with Sensory Overload (they're leaded, so they tone down her super vision). She eventually gets used to things and functions perfectly well without her glasses, but continues wearing them as Kara Danvers. Presumably for Clark Kenting-purposes.
• In the Torchwood episode "Adam", when the title character has altered the Torchwood team's memories and personalities, Owen gets a fetching pair of specs with his nerdier, more awkward persona. As well as a cardigan and a slicked-back hairdo. Geek chic indeed.
• On The Voice Season Four finalist Michelle Chamuel wore large glasses, which caused her fans to don similar hipster glasses. Usher has donned them in support, as has Shakira after her team was eliminated.
• Marilyn Thornhill from Wednesday wears a large pair of glasses, but when Wednesday outs her as Laurel Gates, she removes them, proving that she was only wearing them as part of her disguise.
• One episode of Would I Lie to You? had Sara Pascoe claiming to own a pair of these that she only wears when playing Scrabble, stating she feels smarter wearing them. It was a lie.
• Both Mulder and Scully are seen wearing glasses occasionally in the early seasons of The X-Files. They wore "brainy glasses" both for slide shows or watching TV and for typing reports at the computer, yet obviously they could read or write and watch things in distance without them. Mulder does make a passing reference to "a need for corrective lenses" in the fourth-season episode "Home", but no other explanation in-story for why both stopped using them is given.
• Yayoi's glasses in Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger are purely for data analysis and looking at pictures of Daigo.

Manhua

• Meibo from Infinity Game only wears glasses so she can look smart and more like a Class Representative.

Music

• Comes up in The Grand Spectacular's "Being a Dickhead's Cool," which is a lengthy Take That! toward Hipsters.
  20-20 vision, just a pair of empty frames
  Dressing like a nerd, although I never got the grades

Pro Wrestling

• After her heel turn, Eve Torres regularly wore glasses, even though she never needed them before.
• Stacy Keibler, during her time as Miss Hancock in WCW. Whenever she started dancing, the glasses came off.
• Terri Runnels wore glasses when she was Alexandra York in WCW, as York was supposed to be a businesswoman/computer expert.
• GLOW girl Ashley Cartier used to have an advice segment called "Asking Ashley" where she wore glasses while reading letters from people. Hers were more aesthetic than anyone's - they were just frames, no lenses.

Radio

• In the Ability episode "Girlfriend With Benefits", Jess gives Bob her boss's glasses when she tries to update his online dating profile to make him look intelligent and soulful. After one of his Comically Missing the Point comments, she mutters "Jesus Christ, those glasses are doing a lot of heavy lifting."

Tabletop Games

• Worn by a character who was cut from GURPS Discworld Also, but subsequently discussed on the Web. Wilma is a hamster who was turned into a human, and now travels with a strange group of adventurers. Because she's so much smarter than she was as a hamster, she's convinced she's a genius. And because she's a genius, she should wear thick glasses. The fact said glasses impair her vision doesn't matter to her in the slightest.

Video Games

• Charlie from the Street Fighter Alpha series is a well-educated individual (on top of being devilishly handsome) and can be seen removing his glasses before a fight. A bit of Capcom trivia reveals that the glasses are purely aesthetic, as his vision is just fine. Note that Charlie is an Air Force Pilot, and they have to have 20/20 vision. Come Street Fighter V he has them on all the time, and occasionally does the Scary Shiny Glasses thing with them, to help show that he is not the hero that he used to be.
• Emma plays this straight in Metal Gear Solid 2. When Raiden is about to escort her underwater, she takes off her glasses and he suggests for her to get contacts. Emma then admits that she can see perfectly fine and only wears the frames to look cuter. And because a guy she liked used to wear them. While it is never explicitly said, it is very clear that she wears them in Otacon's memory.
• In Final Fantasy Fables, Chocobo gains a pair of these while he's a Scholar. Most. Adorable. Nerdy bird. Ever.
• Mega Man Zero's Cerveau has glasses that are similar to Cyclops. But that didn't stop him from looking brainy.
• Scholars in Final Fantasy XI have two specially designed pieces of headgear that are mortarboards with built-in glasses. The lower-leveled one has Intelligence and augments their ability to regain MP. The higher-leveled one has Mind (generally associated with wisdom in the game), elemental magic skill, and improves their spell-casting time. But the amazing thing is that the mortarboards can even make Elvaans look smart! They return in Final Fantasy XIV, again for the Scholar Class. The first one is given as part of a Job quest at around 45, the other is a recolor bought with end game currency. There's also various level one specs that are simply there to make your character look cute, they have no real stats attached to them, unlike the scholar glasses.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, most glasses do nothing, unless you take the "Four Eyes" trait, which raises your perception with glasses and lowers it without. Fallout 3 averts this - any glasses you wear grant an additional point to damage resistance. In both games, the lucky shades also increase your luck by 1 along with the other effects. Non-unique glasses are weightless, so if you think your character would look better with them, you can wear them without needlessly weighing yourself down. Averted in Old World Blues with the unique glasses from Dr. Klein and Dr. Mobius, which increase your repair skill and your explosives skill respectively.
• In the Hitman franchise, 47 will always take the glasses of the person he disguises as, regardless if they're a waiter in a cafe, a medic at a sick bay, or a security guard. This is also true of sunglasses, as well as other accessories.
• In Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, Randall's unlockable profile reveals that he actually has excellent eyesight. The only reason why he wears glasses is to imitate a famous archaeologist he admires.
• Guild Wars: Eye of the North introduced three different models of spectacles for characters to wear, which are no different than your standard headgear.
• Persona 5: After the Miscarriage of Justice that lands him on probation, the protagonist starts wearing Nerd Glasses to appear more mild-mannered. They're heavily implied (and later outright confirmed in Royal) to be nonfunctional — the description for them in the inventory only says they "make one look smart", and taking them off to fight monsters when dungeon crawling doesn't stop him from reading his phone and various books, firing guns with pinpoint accuracy, or driving a car. In Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, Futaba seemingly catches on and outright asks if the glasses are fake or not — both of his dialogue options in response are coy nonanswers.
• Asav, the villain of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy wears glasses solely for the purposes of looking smarter and less of a physical threat according to Nadine.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, Rean Schwarzer owns a pair of glasses despite the fact that he can see properly. He usually uses it to disguise himself in public although sometimes he does wear it while teaching to his class.
• Glasses are solely treated as an accessory in The Sims series. Giving them to a Sim won’t change their eyesight whatsoever, and neither will removing them.
• A few pairs of glasses appear as headgear in Splatoon. They function the same as any other piece of equipment, so they do improve your Inkling's abilities... but not their eyesight. There's even fake contact lenses, which are used to give the appearance of having no headwear at all.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1 has several pairs of glasses for characters who don't start out with them (Shulk has a pair of googles but never uses them), but most of them have some already pre-socketed gems on them, leading to players wanting to wear them. Definitive Edition adds in unique glasses models for each character locked behind Time Attack and a cosmetic override feature, letting players give all characters glasses immediately after finding their first pair.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa:
  • The mastermind behind Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc has a sprite where they put on a pair of glasses that seemingly appear out of Hammerspace. They usually use it to deliver some Awful Truth.
  • Gonta Gokuhara from Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony sports a pair of glasses, despite the fact that his eyesight is a positively superhuman 20/0.625, and is good enough to see the microscopic Nanokuma cameras flying around the facility. Justified, as Gonta desires to become a civilized gentleman, and he likely considers glasses to add to that image.
• Rin Tohsaka in Fate/hollow ataraxia puts glasses on whenever she wants to start Info Dumping because she feels they complement her when she's in an explaining mood. She has perfectly fine eyesight and never wears them in any other situation. When she and Shirou get accidentally locked inside a Bigger on the Inside trunk, Shirou starts grasping for any kind of explanation on an escape route and asks if her glasses are secretly magic. An irate Rin explains they're ordinary since if they were magic, she would have used them to leave the trunk the first time she got locked in.
• Tamamori from Hashihime of the Old Book Town has perfect vision, but just wears glasses because he thinks they make him look smart.
• Kenji from Katawa Shoujo claims to wear glasses solely for the effect. He's legally blind with or without them, and a compulsive liar to boot. As usual, it's hard to tell with him.

Webcomics

• Jyrras Gianna of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures doesn't need glasses, and originally started wearing them on the suggestion of Dan, who told him that smart people usually wore glasses. They still serve a purpose, however, in somehow decreasing his cuteness, thus preventing people from slipping into diabetic shock whenever he makes Puppy-Dog Eyes...
• Sarin the Wizard of The Dragon Doctors wore a monocle in the first chapter (and ditches it right around the same time he gets permanently turned into a woman). It's later revealed in a flashback this was entirely an affectation; a kid said Sarin (a young, green-haired man wearing a grey hoodie) didn't look anything like a wizard. Sarin's response was to magically grow a (green) mustache, throw on a robe, and pop in a monocle, with the words, "Impaired vision equals smart!"
• In Dumbing of Age Robin starts wearing these after becoming a professor at Indiana University and freely admits that it's to make her look smarter, using it to prove her point that politics is about appearances.
• El Goonish Shive: Tedd originally wore a pair of massive Opaque Nerd Glasses despite not actually needing them. They were outfitted with several high-tech abilities, but he mostly used them to hide his effeminate face, which he was embarrassed about. After building some confidence, Tedd stopped wearing the glasses except when doing his Mad Scientist shtick. Later on, he realised he was actually near-sighted, and starting wearing small prescription glasses that didn't hide his face.
• Implied in Homestuck with Eridan. For every troll wearing glasses, there is a dancestor (their Famous Ancestor from an Alternate Universe) that also sports a pair, even if it's just sunglasses. Cronus, Eridan's dancestor, wears no glasses. Eridan is a massive hipster, so he would probably be trying to keep the fashion. Alternatively, Cronus actually needs to wear glasses but doesn't in hopes of maintaining his '50s-style greaser persona.
• Inverted in Jungle Juice. Suchan wears glasses when it's time to read, study, or use a computer, but he takes them off to enhance his Bishōnen image. He later uses them as makeshift goggles to keep dust and debris out of his eyes when he's flying, allowing him to exhibit his top speed without fear of hurting his eyes.
• Ping from MegaTokyo does this once to try to get her classmates to like her. The plan fails, unfortunately.
• In one Penny Arcade strip, Gabe, tired of being a geek with perfect vision (other geeks call him "two-eyes"), gets "reverse laser surgery" so he'll need glasses.
• Savestate has a version of this: Kade wears a blue contact lens over his right eye to hide the fact that that eye is a different color.
• In Shortpacked!, Ultra-Car wears glasses after (s)he becomes a Gynoid. Apparently after years of looking at the world through headlights, it's just what (s)he's used to.

Web Original

• Atop the Fourth Wall: In Linkara's The Dark Knight Strikes Again review, he wears one over his regular glasses, since nothing says I am a real reviewer like wearing two pairs of glasses in your face.
  • Averted in real life: He removes the glasses when breaking character because he's done OOC vlogs without them, but he is shortsighted.
• Ask That Guy with the Glasses: In a segment, he reveals that he attended Glasses University, where everyone wears glasses and is therefore smart, good education and effort toward learning being well beside the point. He demonstrates by taking off his glasses, and... well, it's hard to properly describe.
• In The Nostalgia Critic's Alone in the Dark (2005) review guest starring Linkara and Spoony, the latter mocks Tara Reid's infamous archeologist role thusly:
  Spoony: How do we know she's a scientist? Because she wears glasses, of course! And as we all know, any woman who has glasses is either a scientist or an adventurous librarian. As if wearing glasses makes you look any smarter!
  (NC and Linkara glare at Spoony)
  Spoony: (sheepishly) ...I need glasses.
  • The other take of this was Spoony trying to cover his ass and eventually telling Critic that he'd do him. ...he got his wish.
  • Doug Walker himself recently had LASIK and no longer needs glasses, but stated that he will wear them as the Nostalgia Critic as part of the character's signature look.
• The Nostalgia Chick will sometimes wear hipster glasses when she wants to appear more like an academic. In the main cast commentary for Suburban Knights, Lindsay discusses her usage of glasses. She explains that she stopped wearing them because the camera would be reflected in the lens, leading to several other commentators bringing up their own issues of wearing glasses while filming.
• James Rolfe doesn't need to wear glasses, as can be seen in some of his videos, but wears them in his persona as The Angry Video Game Nerd to add to the image of a stereotypical geek.
• Halfway through Todd in the Shadows' review of "I'm Sexy And I Know It," he puts on a pair of glasses as the words "DEEP LYRICAL ANALYSIS" flash across the screen. He spends a good portion of the review gesturing them in his hands, though, possibly due to the Fridge Logic that his character is supposed to be wearing a mask.
• SF Debris: In his review of The X-Files episode "Fallen Angel", SF Debris points out for laughs that Mulder puts on his "brainy specs" so that he can figure out what happened.
• Manatee Girl: The Movie: Lampshaded in regards to Hunky Marine Biologist Boyfriend
  Baby Manatee: I refuse to believe those glasses are prescription.
• Wannabe Granola Girl Amy from The March Family Letters wears a pair of glasses that are fairly obviously fake and without lenses. It's hinted from the start that she mainly wears them because they make her look more "artistic." From the first Q&A video, released before the series began proper:
  Amy: Rammi asks: "Are your glasses real?" ...What is "real," really? This video is just a reproduction of moving visual images that has been altered numerous times so that you may watch it. Is it real? Am I real? ...Rammi, are you real? But if you mean "do my glasses physically exist?" then — then yes, they most certainly do.
• DSBT InsaniT: Julie wears square framed ones.

Western Animation

• There's a moment in Bob's Burgers that pokes fun at people who play this trope straight. A group of hipsters compliment Tina for her glasses, to which she says, "thanks, I need them to see."
• In an episode of Cow and Chicken, Cow immediately became smarter after she started wearing glasses. Chicken then started wearing glasses to try and become smarter — it failed, but he acted like he was much more intelligent.
• On Daria, noted ditzes Kevin and Brittany decide to wear glasses because they believe that doing so will literally make them smarter. Brittany does say something intelligent and then declares, "Wow, these things really do work!" Kevin gets a pair without lenses so that he doesn't become too smart; upon learning that they "don't work" without them, Jane suggests that he get one lens.
• Family Guy:
  • Brian tries to show Lauren Conrad how smart he is by taking out glasses to read. When she asks when he got reading glasses, he says he always wore them. She points out she knows they aren't real as she can see the Austin Powers logo.
  • The subplot of "Peternormal Activity" has Brian donning glasses simply to look sophisticated, much to Stewie's chagrin. Stewie makes several attempts to separate them from Brian before ultimately just swinging a bat into his face.
  • In the unaired episode "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein," Peter mentions that he only wears glasses to fool the draft board.
• On Jimmy Two-Shoes, during a Screw Learning, I Have Phlebotinum! plot, Beezy dons a pair of glasses even though he has perfect eyesight. Heloise apparently needs hers to read, but in one episode she puts them on before giving advice, probably to appear smarter.
• Kaeloo: The characters wear these once every few episodes for a variety of reasons. It's usually Kaeloo and Mr. Cat, but others have done it too.
• It's been debated in Metalocalypse fandom whether or not Charles Foster Ofdensen's glasses are functional or just there to both accentuate his cleverness and make him seem more harmless than he really is (which isn't at all. He's the Badass Normal).
• Later episodes of ReBoot had Dot adopt a pair while working as Mainframe's COMMAND.COM. In earlier episodes she would wear them inconsistently with the implication that she didn't need them, she just liked them.
• In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer finds glasses and immediately starts acting smart, by quoting the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz after he got his diploma (and making the same mistake of referencing the wrong type of triangle). He does the same thing in one of the comics when he buys Artie Ziff's glasses. Mind you, Homer actually seems to be farsighted and has been shown wearing half moon spectacles while reading.
• Steven Universe: Connie originally did need glasses, but in "An Indirect Kiss", her vision was restored by Steven's healing spit. Not wanting to explain to her parents how her sight was magically fixed, she pops out the lenses on her glasses and keeps wearing the frame except when around Steven and the Crystal Gems. About a year later, she reveals this to her mom and stops wearing them at all.
• In Total Drama, it is implied that Scarlett's glasses aren't real, as she takes them off with no effect in Episode 10. This suggests that she was wearing them as part of her disguise as a harmless nerdy kid.

Real Life

• Drew Carey got laser surgery to correct his vision but continued wearing frames for a while because they'd become so integral to his public image. Not only that but he'd become associated with a specific style of glasses modeled after military-issue "Birth Control" glasses (so named because no one wearing them will ever get laid)^note This was lampshaded during the run of the The Drew Carey Show when he addressed the audience while wearing a slimmer, more stylish pair that he usually wore off-camera before switching to his familiar ones right before the show started. He eventually developed a need for bifocals and started wearing glasses with prescription lenses again.
• For a brief time, "Weird Al" Yankovic wore these after he got laser surgery of his own since his glasses were part of his iconic look. He quickly decided this was silly and simply altered his look instead.
  • He still wears them to complement the fat suit whenever he performs "Fat", just because they help the mask stay on better.
• In his youth, Elton John played this trope straight when he started wearing glasses to copy his idol, Buddy Holly. Subverted, now that he can't see without them.
• This trope has its origins in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Educated, relatively wealthy literate people were more likely to need (and be able to afford) glasses than the ignorant masses, or those who earned their fortune in other ways.
• Sadly believed to be played straight in real life by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which executed any "intellectuals" in their attempt to bring Cambodia back to a self-sufficient agricultural community, including anyone who wore glasses.
• In his final months in office, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper suddenly started wearing glasses, seemingly for no reason other than to look smart. They didn't help. In retirement, he has stopped wearing them.
• Even people who don't need a vision correction (or only need a very minor correction, possibly unknown to themselves) are often advised to buy proper lenses anyway that correctly match the human eye and are of the same optical quality as lenses in prescription glasses. Because of the cost of those lenses some refuse and wear glasses with the demo lenses from the store still in the frame. Those lenses are often stamped with the name of the frame manufacturer on them, so, as a result, you can occasionally see people wearing aesthetic glasses whose lenses are half-covered with a brand tag like Prada◊, Vogue◊, etc.
• Zachary Quinto wore thick-rimmed glasses when he was in the midst of filming the Star Trek films because they helped him hide his shaved eyebrows.
• As of late, it seems to be somewhat fashionable to wear large, thick-rimmed glasses that may or may not even have lenses with some outfits. People who wear these often aren't popular with those who are actually vision impaired. (Cheap frames for this purpose are sometimes sold under the name "attitude glasses.")
• It's not uncommon for people who have worn glasses all their life to choose to keep wearing glasses after getting eye surgery, because they like the look of glasses or feel that their face does not look "right" without glasses.
  • Phil Silvers did this because it was his trademark as a comedian. He just removed the lenses.
• Lampião, a famous Brazilian bandit, had his eye pierced by a cactus spine during a confrontation with the local police. The spine was removed, leaving him blind in the right eye, and he subsequently wore glasses to hide this from those who didn't know him. He also switched to firing his gun with his left hand to compensate.
• Commercials for brands and opticians also tend to use models wearing glasses wearing "windows" - lenses that don't refract light. This is the same thing as using Fake Food in commercials, as it lets the audience see the model's eyes but isn't actually portraying vision correcting glasses, which warp the light coming through them.
  • And yes, there are people who find eyeglasses sexy. Pornography for this sort of fetish also use models wearing "windows".
• The aged-up, forensically reconstructed clay bust that was shown on America's Most Wanted and led to the capture of Pater Familicide John Emil List was such an excellent representation of him partly because it included these; knowing that List was arrogant and would want to appear intelligent and professional, the profilers correctly predicted that he would wear them whether he had actual eye problems or not. They even got the type of glasses correct.
• Donald Trump memorably accused former Texas governor Rick Perry of this during the 2016 US presidential primary elections. Trump would then go on to win the presidency and appoint Perry as Secretary of Energy (traditionally considered one of the most intellectually demanding Cabinet posts and previously held by highly educated scientists).
  • This seems to be one of Trump's go-to insults for people with glasses; he also once said no one would take columnist George Will seriously if it wasn't for "those spectacles."
• In certain accessory stores, such as Claire's or Icing, it is possible to buy rectangular-lensed, black-and-neon-framed nerdy-looking glasses that do nothing. In fact, because real glasses dirty so easily, unless the buyer polishes them almost constantly they'll partially obscure her vision. Some people actually wear these spectacle frames without any lens because of the last sentence.
• Initially played straight by Bono of U2, during the band's Achtung Baby era tours. He later developed photophobia (light sensitivity) and glaucoma, and his trademark sunglasses have been prescription since.
• Zig-zagged by Spanish actress and comedian Ana Morgade, who does need glasses but tends to combine empty frames with contact lenses on television appearances. She justifies it by claiming that the bright lights on TV studios would not let her see much if she wore regular glasses.

---