| ‘Oh my God, you look SO much better with your glasses on.’ This is a compliment. Believe me. I didn’t believe it at first but it was, in essence, a clumsily given, verging on offensive, badly worded compliment. With a heavy emphasis on the SO. But it was a compliment nonetheless. Rest assured that I was suitably offended until adequately flattered about my appearance without my beautiful, beautifying glasses. I remember when I was younger and glasses were the accoutrements of what we laughingly termed geeks, helped on by the Saved by the Bell culture imported from America and piped directly into my spectacle-less eyes. Get yourself glasses, preferably thick rimmed, and some braces, maybe a plaid shirt and slightly over-neat hair, carry your rucksack on both shoulders and voila, you are a geek. Congratulations, now go - help the cool kids with their homework and avoid being shoved in your locker by the jocks. What rubbish. In my defence, I was only about five. Maybe I misunderstand this because I was so young, but it seems to me that glasses as a concept have undergone something of a renaissance throughout my short and inexperienced life. Not only glasses, but the entire concept of geekdom. Geekdom is a word I never thought I’d write in an article, yet here we are. When I was about ten, Steps were riding high in the charts and Lisa Scott Lee, the pretty dark haired one with blue streaks, got braces. Good for her, we all thought, it is so refreshing for a young, attractive female role model to take such a risk and help remove the stigma from what is, for some blameless few, an essential piece of orthodontic equipment. Braces are cool, long live the brace! Well yes, I don’t know if this worked because I never had braces and only one of my friends had so much as a retainer. We thought the retainer was great because she kept getting mints stuck in it and could flick it up and down to the tune of popular chart hits. Beat that, Lisa Scott Lee! But glasses? In a culture where everyone, however young, is judged on their looks before their personality, could the final stigma be removed from the appearance of the archetypal nerd? Well, maybe. Once we realised that Screech from Saved by the Bell was making porn, perhaps the stereotype was shattered once and for all. Harry Potter popularised round frames for young fans a few years ago, and emo culture has led to some perfectly sighted teenagers wearing heavy, square, black-framed glasses in deference to the required look. Where once they were an accessory to shame, spectacles are now an accessory to pseudo-intellectual cool. Now that I am a fully-fledged adult entering into the world of work, glasses still seem to carry with them some associations that are impossible to shake. At sixteen I was told my glasses made me look like ‘Carol Vordeman gone wrong’. At my first job I was told they made me look like ‘a sexy secretary’, and at twenty-one it has been said not only that they make me look ‘SO much better’, but also that they make me appear more intelligent. It seems that wearing glasses still causes people to judge you, but that the association they carry has changed from one of a powerless geekyness to one that is more positive and perhaps more empowered. Who doesn’t want to look more intelligent? If I must be judged on my appearance, and it seems inevitable that I always will, then it is surely better that something I have to wear will be construed in a positive light. With the stigmas blown like cobwebs from their frames, glasses are, like never before, an integral part of any spectacle-wearers appearance. Gok Wan has brought about a throng of thick, narrow, colourful frames, helping make spectacles a statement piece of face furniture which can be changed as often as you would change an outfit. They are an accessory, defining a look uniquely yours. Forget contact lenses, forget laser eye surgery, the right glasses can be beautiful, not to mention hide a multitude of eye-bag related sins. I don’t know why and I don’t condone it, but people will always be judged by their appearance so it is a blessing that in this day and age we are encouraged to embrace our sight defects. The concept of the geek still remains, but it is no longer one to be laughed at. The geek is no longer pushed into lockers and bribed to help with homework, but instead is a computer hacker, quietly cool and sexy in a way not dissimilar to Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. I will raise my glasses to that. |
Katherine Holt 2009