It’s all very well saying ‘Don’t read the comments’ but it’s just not always possible. For example, for the YouTube show I do with Amanda Wakeley, Friday Night Fashion, we are very grateful for the support and loyalty from our viewers. And so we like to reply to our mostly lovely commenters, especially if we can be helpful. Inevitably, there’s always a couple of people who want to roll by just to snark. And well, if you don’t want that to ruin whole days or even weeks, you do have to just learn to take it on the chin. ‘What?! Someone on YouTube’s being… an arse? But this has never happened before!’ my husband will cry, mock-clutching imaginary pearls to really ram the joke home.
Yeah, it’s never been a hobby of mine, so I find it hard to understand. But being an arsehole online really does do it for millions of people out there, so I guess we just need to accept that at this stage, that’s unlikely to change.
But then there’s comments like this that I don’t think really come with nasty intent but they nevertheless manage to land with a bit of a sting. I still wonder why this needs to be said:
Always enjoy your vids but don’t understand why you both hide your lovely eyes with massive Deidre Barlow glasses. Am I missing something - I am 74..
What this commenter is missing, at least in my case, is that I need my massive Deidre Barlow glasses so that I can see. Actually for the record, my glasses are in fact by the genius Tom Davies. It’s not the first time I’ve had a comment about ‘hiding’ in my glasses, including once from a complete stranger on the street in New York City!
‘Or maybe I should ask, what?,’ asked the woman, maybe five years older than me. ‘What are you hiding?’
I suppose that, unlike internet trolls, here was a person prepared to say something to my actual four-eyed face. In real life. I was speechless. My daughter still cracks up if it’s ever mentioned.
People who want to know why I’m ‘hiding’ in my glasses usually couch it with some kind of caveat that’s meant to be a compliment - it’s ‘a shame’ because I ‘have pretty eyes’.
But something about women wearing glasses on camera really does give a lot of people the ick. I get my fair share of comments like the one above and then I came across this from award-winning BBC news anchor, Monika Plaha.
‘Frequently asked questions’! I’m sorry how many questions can one have about this? I guess the questions were frequent enough to exasperate Monika into making this explainer video. And considering that she has nothing to answer to/apologise for, I think she’s done it with saintly grace and patience.
Because answer me this: WHY is, ‘Why do you wear glasses on air?’ a question that needs to be answered? What difference is it making? It’s a question that should be met with the same puzzled frown that would come if you were asked, ‘Why are you wearing your hair on air?’ When around 60% of the population are wearing glasses, I’d love to see the stats on how many people need to put theirs on before they chime in to ask why a person on the telly has the gall to wear hers.
And then, a maverick arrived. I found it thrilling a few weeks ago to see that Emma Willis, both gorgeous looking and a gorgeous human, was hosting This Morning wearing her thick frames.
Because it was quite startling to see a main anchor - a female anchor - unapologetically doing so. Think about it: It’s just not something you see that often. A woman on the telly in glasses. Newsnight host Victoria Derbyshire will sometimes have a pair handy to read a crib note live on air. Yes, yes, Prue Leith, but I think we all know that she gets a pass on account of being ‘of a certain age’. And by making a feature of changing up her glasses to match her outfits, Prue has leaned in to making it a style trademark, which for the most part takes the fun out of it for any trolls. But when you’re younger, like Monika Plaha, and you’re just wearing your everyday glasses so you can see and do your job? Armchair warriors throughout the land shall be vexed.
It’s true that I wore mine on the telly. But I’m not sure my blink-and-you-miss-me six minutes a week on Lorraine Kelly’s show was ever going to be a game changer for the culture.
And truthfully, I always did feel self-conscious about wearing my glasses on that show because I usually was the only woman doing it. I just did my best to make my peace with it and decided to listen to the producers at ITV who said they liked me in my glasses. Part of my ‘strong look’.
I suspect they might not have been quite so thrilled if Holly Willoughby wanted to sit on the sofa every morning looking like Brains from The Thunderbirds, but we shall never know. Here is a helpful image of him for those of you who are not Gen X.
And I do wonder too, if my glasses had anything - even a tiny little bit - to do with me not being asked back amidst all the cost-cuts and changes on ITV breakfast. I’m possibly just being paranoid there.
But the truth is, I also quite like my face with glasses on it. Which is just as well, because I need them. Along with a lot of my friends, even I think my face looks a bit odd without them these days. They’ve kind of become as much a part of my face as my eyes and ears and nose. I also think they’re pretty great at hiding a few more lines and wrinkles and eye bags. And if I’m deluding myself on that one, kindly leave me in wallow in my own blissful ignorance. Contact lenses and I have tried, but we’re just not that into each other. In fact, when I begged an optician to please help me try and get them in again, even she admitted that my right eye is a little bit of a bitch when it comes to opening wide enough to get them in.
The only time I feel a bit dismayed is when I’m all dressed up for something fancy and I have to finish off my hair, make-up and whatever dress I’ve decided on, with the big glasses.
And no matter how often I console myself that style icon Jenna Lyons (former JCrew creative director and now a Real Housewife of New York), rocks hers, I do feel that for most of us, glasses really put the dampeners on our glamorous eveningwear.
Somehow I doubt that when Emma Willis starts hosting Strictly, she’ll be teaming her sparkly Saturday night outfits with big frames. And I get it.
Every so often an A-list celebrity will wear her specs at a fancy awards show or film premiere and it launches a million online news articles with writers marvelling at the bravery. And it is a brand of bravery, isn’t it? It’s a willing gamble to look less than what is considered conventionally sexy, which is a marketing risk when casting decisions are still made with those conventional standards very much front of mind.
Yep, all the old myths and cliches really cling hard, don’t they? The ol’ ‘men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses’. That eyewear is for nana-age women who can’t see and who nobody wants to have sex with anymore. The nerd trope in films and of course, the classic: the ugly duckling who is an instant swan once the frames come off.Remember in Neighbours when ‘Plain Jane the Super Brain’ was ‘ugly’ until she took off hers? I can still get furious when I think about how Mike suddenly deciding she was pretty enough to talk to and her not telling him to get well and truly bent.
So to answer our Friday Night Fashion inquisitor, I am not hiding in my glasses. Although I am rubbish at doing my own eye-liner so I’m trying to hide that. No, I am simply wearing them so I can see.
I’d beg everyone to just let a four-eyed bitch live, but I know that’s a big ask.
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