Smart People Wear Glasses

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Homestar tries his hardest to subvert this trope.

In the media, smart characters have a tendency to wear glasses. The association with the Hollywood Nerd archetype helps in modern works, although this trope is older than that. May be Truth in Television, as some say that since smarter people typically do more reading, they place more strain on their eyes and are more likely to develop myopia (nearsightedness). Some studies have gone so far as to claim that myopia itself is linked with open-mindedness and intelligence. On the other hand, glasses are expensive, so people wearing them will not risq them in sports or fights (but some may use contact lens instead).

In Anime, there is a commonly-used variant of this called Glasses-Kun: A Lancer who has black hair, is taller than The Protagonist, is always smarter than the main character, is relatively quiet, somewhat broody, and wears glasses.

In Real Life, there are lots of different types of people who wear glasses, but in fiction they are more rare. This is due to problems such as glare from the cameras in Live Action media, difficulty reading facial expressions, etc., and is the reason why when such characters are present it seems more significant. As proven by the examples, it is also why this trope occurs more so in Live Action, animated programming, and other pictorial media and less so in literature; it's a visual cue to the audience that the character is intelligent, yet is used sparingly because of the aforementioned difficulties involved.

This trope is an inherent part of The Glasses Gotta Go and Beautiful All Along, and often Hollywood Nerd. Super-Trope to Nerd Glasses. The invoked form of this is Purely Aesthetic Glasses. Compare The Short Guy with Glasses.

Examples of Smart People Wear Glasses include:

Please do not list aversions, seeing as then it would be just a list of characters with glasses.

Anime and Manga

  • Ishida Uryuu from Bleach wears glasses and is number one in his class. He also perfectly fits the description for a "glasses-kun".
  • Shizuko from Kaichou wa Maid-sama, who is Good with Numbers.
  • Shin, the Cute Bookworm and Smart Guy in Saint Beast
  • Both Franz Heinel and Shinsuke Maki in Future GPX Cyber Formula. One is a Gadgeteer Genius with cars and a computer expert, and the other is a computer machinist who makes computer games in his free time.
  • Played with in Detective Conan. Shinichi is already very smart without glasses, but as Conan, he wears glasses so he wouldn't be recognized as a younger version of Shinichi.
  • Minamo Kurokawa and Chika Kodama in Yubisaki Milk Tea, who are best and second best of their year, both wear glasses. Later Hidari Morii who Minamo teached as well.
  • Rias from Highschool DxD who, despite having good vision, occasionally wears glasses. On these occasions, it is to help her think, because she thinks she is better at thinking when she wears glasses.
  • After she gets into Tokyo University, Naru from Love Hina passes her Nerd Glasses on to Motoko to help her pass her college entrance exams; Motoko actually wears them while studying, using them in a way that is equal parts this trope and good luck charm.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Tenya Ida, The Smart Guy in Class 1-A in My Hero Academia.
  • Seen more often in the Sailor Moon manga, but even in the anime Ami Mizuno / Sailor Mercury, the smartest character in the recurring cast, occasionally wears glasses when in studying mode.
  • In One Piece, Badass Grandpa Silvers Rayleigh is a Genius Bruiser and font of great wisdom, and wears glasses. Kind of odd he'd need corrective lenses, though, seeing as he's the type who could defeat an army by himself blindfolded.

Comic Books

  • Dilton Doiley in Archie Comics.
  • The Polish comic book Tytus, Romek i A'Tomek has A'Tomek (a nerdy, math-minded kid), professor T. Alent (a genius inventor) and "Papcio Chmiel" (the Author Avatar).
  • From X-Men Hank McCoy (aka the Beast, a Genius Bruiser) wears glasses when he reads. It looks kind of funny, considering that he's a muscular guy covered with blue fur.
  • Evil Genius Dr. Octopus from Spider-Man comics; in some versions, he is Blind Without'Em.
    • He's nowhere near Reed Richard's level, but Peter Parker himself wore glasses in the oldest comics and was always quite a bookworm. Most likely, his vision improved due to the spider bite that gave him his powers.

Fan Works

Film

  • In Sucker Punch, both Dr. Gorski (in the asylum) and Blue (in the nightclub) have glasses, though they mostly only wear them when they need to take a closer look at something (They might merely be reading glasses, rather than corrective lenses). While Dr. Gorski is a psychologist, Blue is smart in that Dangerously Genre Savvy way.
  • Invoked by Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, when she dons glasses to appear smarter and more professional in order to help Paulette get her dog back
  • Exaggerated in Gremlins 2, where, when a gremlin drinks a formula that makes him super-smart (becoming "the brain gremlin") he somehow conjures a pair of glasses out of thin air. H's even called "Mr. Glasses" in the novelization.
  • Dr. Egon Spengler, the brains of the group in Ghostbusters.

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Cookie from Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide.
  • The one and only Steve Urkel, an Extroverted Nerd from Family Matters.
  • A weird example as it's something of an informed trait: scientist Bennett on Dollhouse wears, as Topher so gleefully puts it, "glasses. On a chain!" She's apparently far-sighted because she only wears them when looking at computer screens.
  • Criminal Minds:
    • Garcia, a computer genius, and her boyfriend Kevin Lynch (another genius hacker) both wear glasses.
    • Though he apparently switched to contacts, flashbacks to Reid's youth show that he had some of the largest glasses any child has ever worn, ever.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Giles, while not the resident genius, is the resident Mr. Exposition.
    • Also Wesley, although once he got on Angel, he lost them after a while.
  • Liberty, Toby, and Claire on Degrassi the Next Generation. Actually, if a character wears glasses on that show, it's almost a given that they're intelligent.
  • Daniel Jackson in Stargate SG-1.
    • And in an alternate universe episode where she never joined the SGC, we find Sam Carter wearing huge Nerd Glasses. Presumably in the regular timeline she just wears contacts. Either way, there's no denying that her (excellent) combat skills are not the reason she's on the team.
  • Alex Dunphy from Modern Family is the only one of the Dunphy kids to wear glasses, and is definitely the brains of the family.
  • Ted Kasselbaum, the resident private investigator and genius computer hacker on Just Cause, wears glasses with blue tinted lenses.
    • Peggy, a paralegal with three graduate degrees, also wears glasses.
  • Billy from the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
  • FBI computer genius Winifred from General Hospital wore nerd glasses, even though the guy she was a Distaff Counterpart of (Spinelli) did not. The same actress wore a different pair of glasses as another computer genius in Vengeance Unlimited.
  • Gil Grissom from CSI, at least some of the time. Apparently they're mostly reading glasses.
    • Sid Hammerback and probably Danny Messer from CSI: NY too.
  • Ami from Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, unlike her counterpart in the anime and manga, wears glasses practically 24/7 when not transformed into Sailor Mercury.

Music

  • The children's song "El caballo verde" ("The Green Horse") says in one of its verses that the titular horse is so smart that he wears glasses, either to study (in the Grupo Encanto version) or just to see (as in the popular version from La Granja de Zenón).

Newspaper Comics

  • This was Enforced and lampooned in Peanuts during the brief time Linus wore glasses. Snoopy "borrowed" them at least twice, using them in his Imagination Spot fantasies to "look sophisticated". Naturally, Linus was pretty angry when he caught him with doing it.

Tabletop Games

Web Comics

Western Animation

Real Life

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