Blinders - To See or Not to See

Today's Fashion Frames -- Glasses Bring Focus

Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I like my peripheral vision. That is your ability to see things to the side of you while looking straight ahead. It helps you avoid people running lights or climbing into your blind spot while driving and enhances your shoulder checks. It also lets you know when someone has come up beside you when it is too noisy to hear them. Peripheral vision does that sort of thing for you.

(Reading glasses -- image to right from Image*After)

But looking at fashionable frames on the typical glasses I see more and more people wearing I see frames with temples that seem to block most peripheral vision except maybe from gophers and pigeons sideswiping you. Temples -- by the way - are the side arms of the glasses that go from the hinge part back and over the ears. My Mom worked for an optometrist and glasses manufacturing company for a while and she passed on some of those terms to me.

For myself I have gone to thinner and thinner temples and thinner frames. My frames are a bit ancient... I guess not too many are wearing glasses from the 20th century... and have metal frames all around the lenses and metal temples. I am wearing them in many of my biography pictures I have in my columns. Mine aren't as frameless as the ones above and to the right.

The ones I see more and more often on office people, news reporters, and fashion conscious folk are like the ones to the left. (image to left -- image from iOffer). I do admit they can look sharp. Sometimes they seem a bit odd when the lenses are frameless and have these massive wide temples. They can almost look like the person isn't wearing glasses at all, just the wide dark temples sticking forward from their ears like errant combs or pens.

Still I wonder at how much peripheral vision they remove. I do see from my looking for example photos of the wide templed glasses that the narrow templed ones are still there and still stylish enough. That is a relief for I fear my old faithful frames should likely be replaced soon.

But I wonder... are those blinders good or bad... are there so many distractions in the workplace that people need blinders so that they can focus on their work and the job at hand? Perhaps with a cellphone in one hand and a latte in the other while walking to the subway -- I hope not while driving -- they need a way to focus on the sidewalk ahead with fewer distractions. Just like the draft horses of the past...

Later!
~ Darrell

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