Can wearing glasses actually make you more intelligent? – EYESEEMAG

© Kingsman, Taron Egerton

One Mardi Gras at primary school, I didn’t have any idea what to wear. After much contemplation and self-reflection, I decided to go dressed as… a journalist. To create the chosen look, my mother put together an outfit, more minimal would not be possible: a denim jacket, a shirt, a notebook, a pen and my glasses. In her eyes, and also in mine, glasses were essential for the serious and intelligent image I was going for. And the proof was in the pudding: everyone at school instantly recognized what I was meant to be.

It’s something we see over and over again in movies and on TV. There’s Skeeter, played by Emma Stone in the film The Help who has just finished her journalism degree in New York and demonstrates her new skills by tapping on a laptop… wearing glasses. There’s also the glasses-wearing Velma in Scooby Doo who is by far the most intelligent of the five main characters. Then there’s Elle Woods played by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde who chooses to wear glasses to look more serious when she begins her classes at Harvard. Because you understand, the cliché of a blonde bimbo is already hard to swallow, so wearing glasses makes her instantly more intelligent, or at least that’s what we’re given to understand. It would be hard not to talk about Clark Kent, who, in order not to be rumbled as Superman, wears glasses and works as a (you guessed it) a journalist at the Daily Planet where he eventually becomes editor-in-chief. More recently there was the comedy spy film Kingsman which led us to believe through the Cutler and Gross-wearing hero, Eggsy, played by Taron Egerton, that all good spies should have a pair of glasses in their kit. Let’s leave James Bond’s sunglasses, though, because here we’re concentrating on spectacles.