How cool are reading glasses?

Going by the mass of megastars who frequently don corrective eyewear, including Rihanna, Megan Fox, Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, and Justin Beiber, it’s no wonder that people the world over believe glasses to be cool. 

I mean, if anyone knows about ‘cool’ it’s Vivienne Westwood, and she is regularly seen sporting a pair of high-end specs. She even suggests they are more than just a fashion symbol and rather a thinking tool, saying “I can’t think without my glasses”.

But for the number of celebs who consider glasses to be the epitome of cool, there are an equal number of non-believers who aren’t so fond of the clunky face frames.

Andy Warhol stated “I always think about what it means to wear eyeglasses. When you get used to glasses you don’t know how far you could really see”.

While the American comedian and film producer Steven Wright takes a more light-hearted approach on their limitations: “I had some eyeglasses. I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out.”

Non-believers tend to be well acquainted with the inconveniences of glasses and consider them not from an ‘aesthetic’ point of view, but from a ‘quality of life’ point of view. When you look beyond the magazine photo-shoots and clips from the red carpet, you can see the celebs agree with this notion too. Many who still wear glasses — a famous example being Elton John who owns no less than 250,000 pairs! — have rid their need for them by having Laser Eye Surgery. They are free to wear or not wear them as they please.

The real low down on glasses

If glasses were simply a question of style, with the wearer being able to pop them on whenever they felt like a change in look, there would be no denying their coolness. However, the primary purpose of glasses is as medical devices to help people with refractive errors, such as short sightedness and long sightedness, to see a more accurate and focused image of the world.

This raises a whole boat load of unavoidable and incredibly irritating issues stretching from broken arms and cracked frames to blurry alarm clocks and fogged up lenses.

And as I’m sure many people who wear glasses will agree, not being able to play football, rugby, and hockey, and not being able to swim or engage in winter or water sports, is seriously not cool.

But the problems don’t end there, particularly for wearers of reading glasses. The Optometrist Christopher Kerr reported that four out of twelve ‘ready readers’ he picked up from high street stores had flaws and potentially “severe eye-straining faults”. According to the report, only one pair was deemed satisfactory.

If you choose to wear glasses, you need to be aware it may hinder not only your quality of life but also your standard of vision. With today’s technology and knowledge, we’re able to correct vision beyond the efforts of external lenses which only account for common refractive errors. With Laser Eye Surgery, we’re able to treat everyone’s eyes according to their individual and unique needs, and all in the time it takes to get a new prescription. Now that’s cool. 

Ask us a question below to find out more about Laser Eye Surgery, or if you’d like to book a consultation with us, give us a call us on 020 7224 1005.