Sunglasses are great 🤑🤭😍

🕶️Sunglasses and their history🕶️

Hello Charlie, today I'm gonna tell you about the history of sunglasses. I choose this subject because since the start of the summer I had an obsession with sunglasses, I even made one of my life goals to have the biggest collection of sunglasses ever seen ( I only have three for the moment but we all gotta start somewhere ). So when I was thinking about what my blog was gonna be about I thought of sunglasses and then I remembered seeing a video about their history and so here I am, I've done all the research and I am ready to enlighten you ! ( 👇 down below is my current collection 👇 )

So the oldest object roughly similar to modern sunglasses ever found date back to the Roman empire. The lenses were polished gems, mostly smoky quartz, used to dim the sunlight, but they didn't protect against UV lights. It is said that the tyrannic emperor Nero used cut emerald to watch gladiators fight. We can also find very similar objects in China during the 12th century.

400 years later, in 1752 James Ayscough, an English optician, invented tainted glasses in belief that green and blue lenses could correct some vision problem, unfortunately it still didn't work against UV lights.

The first official sunglasses were created in 1899 by the German companies manufacturing ophthalmic lenses, Rodenstack GMBH after Jean-Marie-Théodore Fieuzal declared that yellow shaded glasses could protect against UV lights. Sunglasses quicky became popular among wealthy people and mostly Hollywood stars as they were rather expensive. It was Sam Foster that manufactured the first cheap, mass-produced sunglasses in 1929.

Thanks to celebrity starting to use sunglasses to avoid paparazzis in the 1930s, sunglasses gained popularity as a fashion accessories because of their mysterious aura. Then Ray-Ban was invented, the aviator sunglasses brand quickly Became iconic during WWII. From the 1960s sunglasses became a part of modern culture and fashion, different styles such as oversized, wrap around or mirrored emerged with aesthetic being their sole purpose. From this point the sunglasses industry kept on using new materials, developing new technology and coming up with new looks with lots of brand, luxe or not, creating their own design and popularizing sunglasses more and more.

Ray Ban ad from 1948

Different types of sunglasses

If you read all this, thank you and I hope you found this article at least mildly interresting. Thanks again and goodbye 👋