Before the war in 1914 it was, I remember, the rarest thing to see anyone wearing dark glasses. As a small boy I would look at a begoggled man or woman with that mixture of awed sympathy and rather macabre curiosity which children reserve for those afflicted with any kind of unusual or disfiguring physical handicap. Today all that has changed. The wearing of black spectacles has become not merely common, but creditable. Just how creditable is proved by the fact that the girls in bathing suits, represented on the covers of fashion magazines in summer time, invariably wear goggles. Black glasses have ceased to be the badge of the afflicted, and are now compatible with youth, smartness and sex appeal.
This fantastic craze for blacking out the eyes had its origin in certain medical circles, where a panic terror of the ultra-violet radiations in ordinary sunlight developed about a generation back; it has been fostered and popularized by the manufacturers and vendors of colored glass and celluloid spectacle frames. Their propaganda has been effective. In the Western world millions of people now wear dark glasses, not merely on the beach or when driving their cars, but even at dusk, or in the dimly lit corridors of public buildings. Needless to say, the more they wear them, the weaker their eyes become and the greater their need for "protection" from the light. One can acquire an addiction to goggles, just as one can acquire an addiction to tobacco or alcohol.
(from The Art of Seeing, Chapter VII: The Eye, Organ of Light)
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