Are those real?

Glasses. 

I don't really care for sunglasses much but ever since I was a little kid I have loved plain old glasses. Really loved glasses. Maybe not as much as this guy -

Yeah...he is actually getting glasses tattooed on his face....not a good idea.

But I do like them and I don't know why. I can't think of anyone close to me growing up that had them so maybe I loved them because they were so foreign to me. Nonetheless, each eye exam would end in a bitter disappointment. The results were always the same.  20/20 vision. What an outrage.

Perfect vision didn't stop me from wearing them though. At every drug store I would pick out a pair of reading glasses and beg for my mom to buy them for me. Picking out a favorite pair was always a difficult task because with them on it was nearly impossible to distinguish my face from my hair, let alone judge what I looked like in them. If only camera phones or digital cameras existed back then. Instead I would have to squint and get really really close to the mirror. People stared. I didn't care.

 My mom never bought me a pair. Probably because by the time I picked one out and walked over to her in them, I looked as if I was going to puke from the dizziness.

When I got old enough to shop by myself with my own money I discovered that Claires, a store in the mall, sold glasses with no magnification at all! I was in heaven. I bought two pairs.
I wore them so often everyone probably naturally assumed they were real. It wasn't until one day, when some friends and I were talking about eye prescriptions and decided to do the whole oh-let-me-try-on-your-glasses switch, that it came up. Someone asked to try mine on and I replied, "Okay, but they're fake."

This is when I discovered that regular glasses wearers don't take too kindly to folk who wear glasses for no reason.

"What? They're fake!"

"Yeah."

"Why would you wear fake glasses?"

"I don't know. I just like them."

The conversation then turned into a lecture about how much glasses sucked and that I didn't understand. How they fog up. How they cause glare. Slip off. Cause headaches. All things I could simply put to an end by taking them off but they had to suffer through in order to see anything.  This continued into more complaining about how contacts can be an even bigger pain; poking your eye every morning and having them dry up or burn.

It was as if they thought we shared a unspoken bond through the torture of glasses that I had fraudulently joined.

After that I made sure to bring it up to new people when I meet them that my glasses are indeed fake. Most people laughed and were a little confused but It's a good conversation starter.

This all changed in the winter 2009. I went in for an eye exam after almost ten years of not having one. When the results came back, I was very surprised. My vision was 20/15! The doctor said really I had no issues reading but he wanted to give me glasses to use in case my eyes start to feel strained after reading for long periods of time. Never having experienced that before I wondered if I subconsciously fluked on the test in order to get glasses. Then I was told even more surprising news. I had an astigmatism in my left eye that had gone unnoticed!

Wow, two things not to really rejoice about but because it hadn't affected my life at all, I was fine with it. And this meant my issuarnce would pay for my first pair of perscription glasses. A week later, my glasses were ready. They were only .5 but it was something. They were prescribed. They were real!

I showed them to one of my glasses wearing friends and he scoffed.

"But, these are prescription!"

"Did you purposely blow the test?"

"No. Not only that but I have an astigmatism thank you very much. And you can't fake that."

 Even with prescription glasses though I continued to wear my fake ones more often because I liked the frame of those better.

The fake glasses wearing has slowly come to a stop this year as it has become the "Hipster" thing to do, and I don't want to risk looking like a Hipster poser.

But...I've found a new outlet for my need to accessorize my eyes. That's right. Fake contacts.

I don't wear them nearly that often but now have two pairs. Blue, and Green. Both total contrasts to my naturally deep brown eyes. Luckily friends know that my eyes changing from brown to blue overnight it must be the result of fake contacts so I've avoided the glasses sham situation.

~Lissa