For decades, sunglasses with black lenses were a practical accessory that changed one's own appearance for the better with one hand movement.
There is research on the subject: through the dark panes, doubt, joy, sadness and anger, i.e. what triggers facial expressions, are invisible to others.
We seem more aloof, cooler.
We also seem more glamorous, thanks to the style models of the past, the most famous of whom really had to protect their eyes from the glaring photo flashes of the paparazzi.
Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy, James Dean were among them and also shaped the image of the sunglasses.
The cultural scientist Vanessa Gill-Brown received her doctorate from Nottingham Trent University with these findings a few years ago.
Jennifer Wiebking
Editor in the "Life" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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Then came the masks.
Even with this one or the other emotion can be hidden, but sunglasses with dark glasses hardly fit anymore.
Being half incognito is one thing, covering your face from your chin to just above your eyebrows is another.
A pair of glasses for this time
The problem arose last summer, but at that time there was no mask requirement in many places outdoors.
The incidence was also much lower than it is now.
Sure, safety takes precedence over style, but for the latter there is now a solution that hardly seems like that at first.
Colorful glasses!
They are reminiscent of those celebrities who made them their trademark, Elton John, Johnny Depp.
And they are reminiscent of the late nineties and the early days of the new millennium, when a few more people wanted to run around like that, Britney Spears and Brad Pitt and the then dream couple Posh and Becks, for example.
Although there is always talk of a comeback, this era has not produced anything really astonishing from today's perspective.
After all, the glasses can now be recycled.
They protect against sunlight and do not isolate their FFP2 carriers from the rest of the world.
Instead, they color everything bluer, greener, rosier.
If sunglasses are the everyone's accessory that has always come closest to being a star, then these glasses, colorful, semi-transparent, but also in other ways, go with the times. After all, most stars have long since stopped showing their private lives. They document in detail how they live and tell of their feelings - and are role models.
Oversharing
has become a way of life for many. And the colorful glasses show more clearly than the dark, subtle things what the sunglasses have always stood for anyway: precisely because we wear them, we want to be seen.