08/22/2009

One of the talking points you hear from people who sell designer eyewear is that a person who wears $500 shoes and $5 reading glasses is penny wise and pound foolish. (Or, anyway, she's making a big mistake.) After all, you wear glasses right there on your face, which people look at all the time, while hardly anybody but fashionistas and foot fetishists pays close attention to shoes.

On the other hand, how often do you leave the house in the morning wearing a pair of Jimmy Choos only to discover by lunchtime that you've managed to misplace them and will have to buy or borrow a replacement pair if you want to read the menu? Hardly ever. Shoes, because you can't walk that far without them — not, at least, without noticing that you aren't wearing any — are considerably harder to lose than reading glasses. (Of course, when you do manage to lose a pair, you almost never discover that they've been sitting right there on top of your head all along, though that may be irrelevant to the topic under discussion.)

This is probably why people who wear glasses all the time and need them to see are willing to pay more for them. Their glasses are more like shoes — less likely to be taken off, put down somewhere, walked away from, and never found again, which happens to thousands of pairs of $5 reading glasses — and more expensive ones, too — every day.

Also, their glasses are on their faces all the time. How many people that they aren't married to ever see them without them?

Terry McInerney, RN, BSN, discovered an additional justification for her investment in designer frames. She's a nurse at the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill, and happened to be working in an operating room the last time she needed new glasses. OSHA regulations would've required that she wear a face shield or a pair of safety goggles with side shields on top of her regular glasses — unless the temples of her glasses were wide enough to function as side shields. When she noticed a waiter wearing a pair of jazzy black and green Prada frames with wide temples, the attraction was immediate.

Besides, she says, wearing scrubs to work every day — even scrubs in upbeat prints — limits your visual self-expression. Your glasses make a big difference.

I'm thinking this is almost true for writers who tend to schlump around in leggings and baggy T-shirts and keep their reading glasses on most of the time. Which may be no more than a transparent attempt to justify paying for some snazzier frames. Nothing in the Prada range, mind you, since I do manage to lose my reading glasses periodically even though, most of the time that I'm not actually looking through them, they're dangling from a cord around my neck. (I know this is forbidden by style advisers, who see the glasses-around-your-neck trope as a cliche that advertises middle-aged obliviousness, but I need to be able to read small type, and I can't afford a personal assistant who'd run around after me all the time keeping track of where I left my glasses. The cord around the neck works just as well and doesn't require health insurance.)

I've been looking at some Wayfarer knockoffs sold by alekofkiev on eBay for $12.99 plus $4.99 shipping, but I wonder how long they'd last. On the other hand, I've managed to break a couple of pairs of genuine Ray-Bans without even trying.

There's also a pair of handsome "vintage fashionable thick black Eyeglasses frames" offered by an eBay seller called codihong88 in Goyang, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. The shipping is free, but they're $15.99, and I'd still have to have lenses made for them. Besides which, Goyang, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, sounds very far away — even farther given that the description begins "This is the fashionable glasses ..."

Then there's Margarita Mamma, who operates a well-organized eBay store called Back Thennish Vintage ("coolest readers on the net") with more than a thousand pairs of reading glasses. I like some of her styles — the "really rectangular" Razor, $14.99; the Drew horn-rims, $19.99; the Jeff horn-rims, also $19.99 — but I really like the Boss bold horn-rims, which are $59.99, not to mention the really bold John Lennon black horn-rims, which are $39.99, and that's without lenses.

There's eyebuydirect.com, which advertises prescription eyeglasses starting at $7.95, though all the frames I like seem to cost $25 or $35. On the bright side, they let you upload a photo and "try on" different frames online. But they don't have anything as massive as the John Lennons. (Which, I realize, might be just fine with you.)

Finally, I've been flirting with Eyebobs ("eyewear for the irreverent and slightly jaded") off and on now for a couple of years. They're made by Julie Allinson, a Minneapolis woman who couldn't see paying hundreds of dollars for custom reading glasses but wanted something with more zip than the ones she found at Walgreens. Her reading glasses have great shapes, unexpected names ("Ornery," "Acid Trip," "Old Money," "Adult Supervision") and come in striking colors — including several colorations of tortoiseshell.

But they cost $65, sometimes more, which I, cheapskate that I am, can't help noticing is the equivalent of 15 pairs of the $5 readers from Dollar General, which my sister Eileen highly recommends. Also, I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to stop at one pair, and it could turn out to be an expensive habit: There are 16 different styles on my list of faves. Besides which, boutiques that carry them never have all the styles in all the colors — but if you buy them online (eyebobs.com), you don't get to try them on, so how can you be sure?

Truly, it's a quandary.

(Next week: A roundup of all the biggest eyewear trends for fall 2009, in case you aren't already having enough trouble making up your mind.)

Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Press Syndicate, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.