Last Updated on January 20, 2025 by Nathaniel Tower
When creating a character, their appearance is a useful nonverbal means of informing the reader or viewer about who they are. This can move their story forward, establish key elements of their persona, and even provide hints about their backstory and motivations. It helps mold them into a real, tangible character regardless of what sort of hijinks they may end up in throughout the narrative.
Glasses are an interesting tool in character creation.
Think Superman hiding behind his Clark Kent persona, Elphaba ditching spectacles after being made over by Glinda, or Mia Thermopolis switching to contact lenses to fully embrace becoming the new heir of Genovia. Glasses often fall into the role of establishing the nerdy trope and enabling a butterfly transformation moment. Still, they can also go beyond that and build details for a character’s life and arc. With proper utilization, glasses can effectively create a realistic character. Here’s how:
Finding references for your character’s look
Ernest Hemingway once said writers should “create living people; people, not characters.” Moreover, Alexandre Dumas shared his view that fictional characters can only be created after studying people at length. As such, it helps to take real-life inspiration and references before imagining your characters.
There’s a thin line between character and caricature, but you can build out your character slowly and visualize them. You can look at real-life glasses from Eyebuydirect and see plenty of styles, materials, and price tags in modern eyewear. With models categorized under eco-friendly tags, retro styles, or even artsy patterns, you can establish aspects of what is essential to your character. Do they try to stand out from the crowd with Charming heart-shaped glasses? Are they fashion gurus who maintain appearances by sticking to premium brands like Coach or Armani Exchange? Perhaps they embody the treehugger vibe and stick to bio-acetate materials. All of these details can inform readers on who your characters are.
Harry Potter, Walter White, and Daria regularly wear their spectacles in their respective universes. Each one is a starkly different character from the other, with a unique relationship to their eyewear that grounds them. If you look at how their glasses contribute to their character growth and experiences, you can see how such a simple accessory can complete a person’s narrative position. The tonal differences between these pieces are huge, but that only lends credence to the ability to use such an element regardless of your writing style.
Defining the “why” in adding glasses to a character
Creating a realistic character with glasses means giving purpose to their eyewear. Instead of making it a design choice for its own sake, this can be an exercise in diving deeper into their lifestyle, background, and preferences. Maybe they have a familial history of bad eyesight, an optical accident that changed their vision completely, or they spend a lot of time doing activities that strain their eyes.
JK Rowling’s character descriptions are an excellent example of what to do when crafting your character and sharing them with the audience. They reveal something essential about the character, like Harry Potter’s glasses being held together with tape, which tells us much about his difficult home life. You can establish the spectacles as a core part of your character, weaving it in with enough detail to capture a complete identity while not going overboard with attributes that don’t matter. By being selective with your details, you can be more mindful of how this advances the plot or enriches your character.
Essentially, you want your character’s glasses to serve a purpose. Even in lighthearted series like Scooby-Doo, Velma’s glasses become a core part of her identity and are used as a recurring gag as she loses them throughout the many adventures the Scooby gang gets into. It’s a simple definition with a clear purpose, resulting in numerous situations where the character misidentifies friends from foes and allows her to cause even more shenanigans for the gang.
Tropes, symbolism, and using glasses as a narrative tool
Glasses tropes are easy to fall into, but this also makes them ripe for use as a narrative tool and a symbol for messages or themes you want to impart. Consider how Bernard wears and constantly cleans his glasses in Westworld. This immediately grounds the character with a specific trait and quirk but also serves as a subtle hint of his true nature through his eyesight. Small gestures humanize the character and help the story unfold without spoonfeeding the audience.
In Squid Game, Sang-woo gradually shifts into a darker persona to survive the games. He removes his glasses as he embraces the dastardly acts he must commit. There’s a practical element to justify this change, but it also works well to represent the mask removal that allows him to blur the morality of his actions.
In Lord of the Flies, Piggy’s glasses are a significant plot point and character element. He requires them to function, and their essential purpose is furthered as they are used to start a fire for warmth, food, and a signal for help. Eventually, the glasses are forcefully taken, and it’s a clear indicator of the group’s loss of reason.
Countless media shows the power of glasses to tell a story and establish realism within a character in a creative way. It also helps the audience form a deeper connection with a character. A study from the University of Florida found that people become more emotionally attached to fictional characters by “making similar judgments about their personalities as they do with real-life people.” There is also a greater tendency to assume that these characters share similar characteristics with themselves, further deepening the associated attachment. With the right attributes, you can make them feel more authentic and corporeal to the audience.