Faces like this can be found in lockers near you.
Sherri & Terri: [to Bart] Nice glasses, four eyes.
Nelson: Yeah, nice shoes... uh, two feet.
Nelson: Yeah, nice shoes... uh, two feet.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that nerds wear glasses. They typically wear ugly, unflattering glasses that help them as they study, read, and obsess over obscure academic topics. There are several types of glasses that are signifiers of deeply-entrenched nerd-dom:
- Chunky black plastic (tape on the bridge optional), sometimes chunky tortoiseshell plastic instead—as worn by the classic nerd, though these have lately come back into fashion again, style being a Cyclic Trope
- Coke-bottle glasses so thick they're opaque—have their own page at Opaque Nerd Glasses
- Unflatteringly large glasses poorly proportioned to the wearer's face—often with thin frames; in live-action, these have the advantage of not blocking the wearer's face
- Old-fashioned round hornrims—sign of an Absent-Minded Professor or academic nerd. Like the chunky black plastic example above, round hornrims have also become popular again as of The New '10s
- Half-moon glasses—around the 50's, these were the eyewear of choice for the original nerds, although nowadays they're more of an old lady librarian style
- Browline glasses—a two-piece frame with thick plastic upper frames and thin wire lower frames popular in the fifties and sixties. Most often seen on highly intelligent and well-read types, or people who like to think they are. Similar to the above-mentioned black plastic and hornrim glasses, browlines are also back in as of late
- "Cat-eye" glasses—once ultra-fashionable for women in the 50's, now usually restricted to lady nerds (and the occasional hipster)—unless they have rhinestones or are purple, in which case they are Impossibly Tacky Eyewear
- Repaired glasses—broken frames held together by a shoddy repair job involving improvised materials like paper clips and adhesive tape
This trope frequently overlaps with Pubescent Braces.
Sub-Trope of Smart People Wear Glasses. Compare to Glasses of Aging, which is when the glasses are a signifier of advanced age. Contrast with Bespectacled Cutie and Glasses Are Sexy, for cases where the glasses are used to make a character cuter or sexier, respectively. Related to Bullying the Bespectacled, with which it may overlap. You may also be interested in the other Glasses Tropes.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro: Nagatoro's Senpai (real name Naoto Hachioji) wears a pair of horn rims at the beginning. However, in Chapter 73 he starts wearing contacts, and still pushes up the bridge of his glasses long after he stops wearing them out of habit.
- Dragon Ball: To show that Son Gohan has achieved his dream of becoming a scholar, he's wearing glasses to show what a nerd he has become. A lot of media focuses on this adult Gohan having neglected his training time and time again. His Super Saiyan transformation and beyond fixes his vision, so he doesn't need glasses while he's transformed. Whenever he's back into action as a badass fighter with nothing holding him back, he doesn't wear glasses.
- From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad's Been Reincarnated!: To drive home the Tondabayashi family are the only otaku in the story, all three family members are also the only people who wear glasses.
- Ginga Teikoku Kouboushi: Volume 1: Foundation: Dr. Lewis Pirenne is of short, round stature with large, round eyeglasses (with frames so thin, the artists sometimes neglect to draw the temple stems). Dr. Pirenne is in charge of the Encyclopedia Galactica that the Foundation has been working on for fifty years.
- Saruhiko Fushimi, SCEPTER 4's resident hacker (and third-in-command) from K, wears the thick black frames kind. They don't get in the way of his good looks, though.
- Sayaka Kanamori in Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! has a pair of these, which she tends to wear on her forehead. A bit unusually, while she is somewhat awkward and doesn't seem particularly popular, she's the least nerdy person in her social circle.
- Orange: Bespectacled Saku Hagita is almost never shown without a book to read. As shown during the botaoshi event, he has Geek Physiques, compared to Kakeru's lean but fit body and Suwa's muscular build. In the future, however, he no longer wears them, having apparently taken note of Azusa's incessant demand for him to do so.
- Ouran High School Host Club: Haruhi is introduced wearing thick black frames that are a clue to her frugal and resolutely practical nature—she normally wears contacts, so why waste money on fashionable glasses? They also serve to make the The Glasses Gotta Go more dramatic by disguising her "secret identity" as a girl.
- Sgt. Frog: Kululu, the Keroro Platoon's resident Mad Scientist, wears Opaque Nerd Glasses with spirals on them.
- Yowamushi Pedal: Protagonist Onoda Sakamichi's oversized, round glasses serve to illustrate his otaku nature. Except when he appears behind opponents, when they become Scary Shiny Glasses.
Asian Animation
- Rocket Boy & Toro: “Intern Square” (Dr. Square’s past self) wears square-shaped glasses and has enough geeky interests to detect temporal energy from Rocket Boy when he arrives in the past.
Card Games
- In the Wing Commander Collectible Card Game, one of the character cards, Simon "McGoo" LeDuke, wears a pair of thick-framed glasses.
Comic Books
- Batman: Black and White: In "Broken Nose", Batman hunts down a man who robs banks wearing Powered Armor. Out of the armor, he turns out to be a skinny geek wearing half-moon glasses.
- Robin (1993): Tim's nerdy friend Ives wears large round glasses which, when coupled with sweater vests and his tall, stringy physique, are not at all flattering. He eventually starts filling out and wearing more flattering clothes, but the glasses stay.
- This trope is lampshaded in a Spider-Man issue where Black Cat mugs a Horizon Labs employee for her outfit. Electro scoffs at the disguise and asks how anyone is supposed to buy someone as hot as Black Cat as a "nerd-girl."
Black Cat: Easy. One, I've got the smarty glasses.
- Superman: The core principle of the Clark Kent persona is, of course, the implausibility of Superman wearing dorky black nerd glasses.
- Wonder Woman (1987): Cassie's Black and Nerdy hacker extraordinaire best friend and Secret-Keeper Georgia Redmond wears large wire-framed glasses.
Comic Strips
- Scary Gary: The "LAB NERD" mix Leopold bought grows a lab nerd who is already wearing glasses.
Films — Animation
- Big Hero 6: While large and round, Honey Lemon's glasses are also attractive and fashionable.
- Marlena Gru of Despicable Me wears cat-eye glasses as a form of Impossibly Tacky Eyewear because of their gaudy design.
- Dick Grayson in The LEGO Batman Movie wears glasses so heavy that they actually exist as a separate Lego piece, and aren't just drawn on his face. In his Robin identity, he wears a green-tinted version instead of a mask.
- Monsters, Inc. 1: Randall Boggs starts out with a pretty magnificent pair of horned rim glasses in the prequel Monsters University (taking place before he became a villain) that make him look positively dorky. Unfortunately, he stops wearing them less than a minute into his first appearance because his roommate Mike Wazowski says they give away his camouflage ability. He thus spends the rest of the movie (and Monsters, Inc.) squinting to compensate for his impaired vision.
- My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
- Unsurprisingly, it's a trait for some of the Techies, like Scribble Dee (large, brown-rimmed round ones) and Micro Chips (thick, black-rimmed square ones). Also lean into Eye Glasses with their eyes occupying the whole lenses.
- Human-world Twilight Sparkle wears these in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games. Unlike her pony counterpart, she really needs those as she's Blind Without Them. Adjusting her glasses is a Character Tic for her.
- Turning Red:
- Downplayed with Mei. She's undoubtedly a huge nerd, and she does wear glasses. However, her glasses are fairly stylish and well-fitted to her face, not the kind of ill-fitting monstrosities that scream "nerd" to everyone in sight.
- On the astral plane, Ming's teenage self is shown to have worn thick glasses, and she had similar academic pressures to Mei.
Films — Live-Action
- Judy from 9 to 5 has a pair of octagonal and huge eyeglasses.
- In Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant plays a clumsy paleontologist with nerdy Harry Potter-like glasses.
- Arnie Cunningham from Christine wears thick, black glasses. Later on, they're broken by school bullies and fixed with the stereotypical white tape. Even later, however, after Christine has made him cool, he discards them altogether.
- Doll Factory: Melvin wears glasses, and is as nerdy as they come.
- The titular Eddie from Eddie the Eagle wears glasses, and he breaks several pairs in his practice sessions. The real-life Eddie Edwards wears them too.
- In A Foreign Affair, Phoebe Frost (played by Jean Arthur) wears unflattering, round-ish horn rims.
- From Russia with Love has Rosa Klebb wearing particularly hideous thick-framed and thick-lensed glasses in many scenes.
- Janine from Ghostbusters (1984) wears big, thick glasses which give her a "bug-eyed" look, as Venkman comments.
- Boris the Russian hacker wears glasses fixed with red adhesive tape in GoldenEye. Which he always wears on the edge of his nose, somewhat defeating their purpose.
- It's a Wonderful World, Guy Johnson steals a horribly thick pair of round horn rims from a Boy Scout for a disguise. He can barely see out of them.
- Jurassic Park:
- Jurassic World: Lowery has a pretty thick pair of glasses.
- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: Franklin is a stereotypical nerd, and he has glasses.
- Rick Vaughn, in Major League, is fitted with these, curing the vision problem that got him branded with the nickname "Wild Thing". However, the glasses don't hurt his persona and he still has fangirls (and, oddly, fanboys).
- Meatballs: Spaz is a classic example: he's a textbook nerd and his glasses are made of thick black plastic with a taped-up bridge. On Parents' Day, his father turns out to wear almost identical glasses, right down to the tape on the bridge.
- MonsterVerse: Recurring character Dr. Houston Brooks, Dr. Rick Stanton in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), and Josh Valentine in Godzilla vs. Kong all have browline/chunky-black glasses and are definitely nerdy, as does Dr. Serizawa's father Eiji in his younger years in the prequel graphic novel.
- Pacific Rim:
- Resident Kaiju biologist Newt Geiszler has a pair of thick, black ones.
- Newt's vitriolic best friend Hermann Gottlieb also has nerd glasses, though his are of the grandpa Coke-bottle variety and he only needs them for close looks at stuff.
- The Phoenician Scheme: The nebbish entomologist Bjorn wears round glasses. It's part of an act and he takes them off after revealing his true profession as an American spy.
- Predator (1987). Hawkins, the team's radio operator. His actor Shane Black wanted to wear authentic military-issue ballistic glasses, but John McTiernan preferred him to look as geeky as possible.
- Revenge of the Nerds: Nerd-in-denial Lewis Skolnick has thick black half-frame glasses.
- The TRON films go a little wild with these. Aside from Flynn and Dillinger, almost every other human member of the cast has thick, very '80s nerd glasses. Justified as this is a software and electronics company, and exploited in the first film, as the thick glasses help distinguish the human Users from their cyberspace counterparts, but Downplayed as of TRON: Legacy's ARG, as Lora apparently got contacts or Lasik, Alan's frames are wire-rim and more subdued, and Roy (in the extras) still has a pair of coke bottle glasses. In the Alternate Continuity video game sequel, however, Alan still has thick and unflattering glasses and son Jet has black-framed "hipster" glasses in the analog world, but The Glasses Come Off once they hit cyberspace.
- X-Men Film Series:
- Dr. Hank McCoy wears the horn-rimmed variety in X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, which in his case is a visual cue that he's a geeky academic.
- In Days of Future Past, Dr. Bolivar Trask's glasses are a tad too big for his face, but were considered fashionable during the time period he lives in. His eyewear is meant to denote his status as an engineer (more specifically a weapons designer).
Literature
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: Arnold draws himself with enormous ones, which illustrate his weak-looking, gawky appearance and vulnerability to getting beaten up by bullies.
- In A Bad Case of Stripes, the doctors all wear huge black glasses.
- Ponder Stibbons, Discworld's resident Magitek geek, wears glasses, which cover artist Paul Kidby draws as these.
- Discharge! (gelefant): Galena wears black-blue glasses with large, circular lenses and fairly thin frames. Her dream is to be a top-level geologist, hence her internship at a college's geology lab.
- Earth's Scariest Monsters!: Isabelle wears big, round glasses with thin frames. She's stated to be incredibly intelligent; has three degrees (her majors were anthropology, philosophy, and psychology); and loves Halloween, monsters, and mysteries so much that she's quite knowledgeable about the paranormal and supernatural.
- Ultra-stickler Percy has round hornrims in the Harry Potter novels.
- Insect Inside: Aubrey wears large, black, hornrimmed glasses along with having Messy Hair, Pubescent Braces, and Youthful Freckles. She enjoys reading and loves superheroes. She's bullied because of her braces, freckles, frizzy hair, and glasses. Part of said bullying is others commonly calling her a nerd. She's also frequently considered to be frumpy and ugly. She's bullied twice (the first time by Mila, the second time by Sadie) during the story.
- Magic Hour:
- Downplayed with Meliantha. She wears glasses and can certainly be considered a nerd because of her love of animation, anime, art, superheroes, and video games. Despite that, said glasses are fairly stylish (they're black with reasonably-sized rectangular lenses and only fairly thin frames) and not the kind of ill-fitting, unflattering monstrosities that are common for this trope.
- Heidi wears black glasses with large, rectangular lenses and fairly thick frames. She's a Cute Bookworm who's obsessed with fantasy (her favorite genre), folklore, magical/mythical creatures, and mythology. She also enjoys drawing and painting, with her favorite subjects being the aforementioned magical/mythical creatures.
- Also downplayed with Ophelia. She wears glasses and can be thought of as nerdy due to her high intelligence and love of art, fairy tales (her favorite genre), history (which includes liking to visit old castles, mansions, and palaces), and princesses. However, her glasses are definitely fashionable (they're pink with reasonably-sized round lenses and only somewhat thick frames) and not tacky in any way.
- Nerdycorn: Fern wears a pair of glasses with big, thick rims. Some of the unicorns mock them by putting a pair of donuts up to their eyes.
- TimeRiders: Maddy Carter. She also has the frizzy hair and asthma.
- World's Greatest Animals:
- Alice is a Perky Goth who wears black, browline glasses with fairly large square lenses. She loves anime, art, music, and video games. She also has a passion for prehistoric animals that eventually led her to become a celebrated paleontologist and paleoartist.
- Monique wears black glasses with large, rectangular lenses and fairly thick frames. She firmly believes in the power of imagination and has a lifelong fascination with cryptids and cryptozoology, the latter of which eventually resulted in her becoming a highly respected cryptozoologist herself nicknamed the Cryptid Queen.
Live-Action TV
- The Big Bang Theory: In a cast chockablock with nerds, Leonard is the only character to wear Nerd Glasses, in the "thick black plastic" variety. Interestingly, the Finnish name for the show happens to be Rillit huurussa which literally means "Frosted glasses".
- Black Sails: 18th century pirate Dufresne wears small, round, wire-framed glasses, which establish him as the ship's nerdy, noncombative accountant.
- Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor sometimes wears a pair of dark tortoise-shell rectangular-frame Purely Aesthetic Glasses, which he calls his "brainy specs".
- Recurring character Osgood wears large glasses with chunky plastic frames.
- In a behind the scenes segment for The Drew Carey Show, Drew Carey mentions that he needs to get in costume. He then simply switches from a pair of wire-rim glasses to his iconic Nerd Glasses. Lampshaded in the (full) second opening of the show, where Drew's glasses are broken and by his friend's advice he replaces them by going to the nearby Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and stealing Buddy Holly's.
- Mac Lesggy, host of the French science show E=m6, wears thick-framed glasses, though they're tamer than his once-iconic zebra-framed glasses.
- Stereotypical Nerd Steve Urkel from Family Matters wears a pair of large, roundish, red glasses with thick frames.
- The Flash (2014):
- Dr. Harrison Wells wears glasses with thick plastic rims that are black on the upper half and clear on the lower half. They manage to suit him very well, despite being obvious nerd glasses that help to indicate that he is a genius even compared to the other highly intellectual characters. Flashbacks to before Eobard Thawne killed and replaced the original Harrison show him wearing similar glasses with completely clear frames that look significantly dorkier. His Earth-2 doppelgänger wears similar glasses to him, although he tends to save them for when he's working in the lab. As a more action-oriented character, he often goes glasses-less.
- Hartley Rathaway and Martin Stein are the only other characters anywhere close to Wells's intellectual league, and they also wear black plastic glasses.
- Nerdy Bill from Freaks and Geeks wears a large, clunky, unflattering pair.
- In Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Carisi has worn a pair of clunky black plastic ones with a camera inside while undercover at least twice.
- In Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Clark's glasses are originally a set of dark brown tortoiseshell browline glasses. In later seasons he switches to a more modern and stylish pair that doesn't work nearly as well at hiding his identity.
- Moimi Glazami: One of Lyosha's classmates is a timid guy who is made fun of, alleging his lenses have blinding abilities.
- In the early seasons of the show, Adam Savage of MythBusters wears large, chunky plastic glasses that even other members of the team call "coke-bottle lenses". They're thick enough that they might also grant him some additional protection in the occasional event where something might explode. He wears smaller frames in later seasons, but they're still thick, black plastic.
- In Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, Simon Nelson-Cook (more commonly known by his nickname Cookie) has black glasses with tech fitted on them.
- The Newsroom: Sloane occasionally wears thick-framed and unstylish glasses while dressed down to remind us that she's a nerd. While not wearing them, she's usually very fashionable.
- Odd Squad: Oscar, the resident lab leader of season one, is a friendly scientist who wears a pair. Olympia from season two has a pair of red Odd Squad-branded glasses as well, and to say she was a nerd in all things Odd Squad would be an understatement.
- Our Miss Brooks: School principal Osgood Conklin favours browline glasses. In "Living Statues", he denies needing them to see, claiming that he wears them only to add dignity to his appearance. In Seasons 2 and 3, and The Movie Grand Finale, the head of the school board, Mr. Stone, sports old-fashioned black hornrimmed glasses. Joseph Kearns, who assumed the role of Mr. Stone on radio and television in 1953, wore glasses in real life.
- Uncle Junior on The Sopranos wears an oversized pair of glasses with thick frames. Dominic Chianese, who played Junior, said that these glasses pretty much were Junior.
- Stargate SG-1: Dr. Daniel Jackson, the show's Adventurer Archaeologist, wears large wire-framed glasses. In fact, looking at how the use of Daniel's glasses changed over time is an interesting way to visualize his character development. His initial characterization is as a naive, dorky academic and the unfashionable hair and glasses emphasize this, but over time as the character toughens up, many of the "dorkiness markers" are dropped. By the last few seasons, Daniel apparently wears contacts 20-30% of the time, and finally in Season 10 his glasses are replaced with more fashionable ones, which fits with the Badass Bookworm character type he has picked up. One dorky Alternate Timeline Daniel also has thick-framed nerd glasses, to contrast with the regular Daniel who had had enough character development to no longer be dorky at that point, and to emphasize the extreme dorkiness of the alternate version they needed something different.
- Ugly Betty: Part of the eponymous character's "ugliness" is the pair of thick-rimmed glasses that she wears.
- The X-Files: "Chinga" has a Sadist Teacher named Jane who slaps an autistic girl because she has a tantrum (true, she's a Creepy Child with a Perverse Puppet, but still) and would like to burn her mother. Jane's glasses exhibit nearly every feature of the Nerd Glasses: very unflattering, with thick coke-bottled lenses and strangely-shaped large chunky frames. Could she be more unlikeable?
Music
- Elvis Costello wore a thick-framed black pair, at least early in his career, when he seemed to be consciously projecting an awkward/Buddy Holly style.
- Andy Fletcher from Depeche Mode wore a thick, black pair
◊ during the band's early days.
- Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo. You may notice that the band tends to dress identically, save Mark with his glasses/goggles; this is because he has been legally blind since a child and can't see much without them.
- John Frusciante, formerly of Red Hot Chili Peppers, never wore the glasses onstage with the band, but off stage and in most of other performances, they're almost always present.
- Buddy Holly chose thick, black frames for his glasses after deciding that he could not perform without them, so he'd better make them a part of his image.
- Trevor Horn wore these early in his career. They even appear on the cover of The Buggles album Adventures in Modern Recording.
- The Proclaimers are famous for not only being identical twins with near identical singing voices, but both wear the same glasses too. Poor eyesight is particularly common in Scotland where the band is from, compared to the rest of the UK, so this is something of a fitting trope.
- Jarvis Cocker alternated between these and contact lenses during Pulp's heyday. Nowadays, the specs are an integral part of his image.
- Tears for Fears:
- In the second "Mothers Talk" music video, Roland Orzabal has horn-rimmed glasses in the scene where he's surrounded by newspapers to convey that his character is a Bookworm.
- In the "Head over Heels" music video, Curt Smith wears large, square-ish spectacles in order to portray a geeky library janitor.
- In the second "Mothers Talk
- John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants wears these most of the time, so much that it became part of his image. His bandmate, John Linnell, later started wearing the glasses, but unlike Flansburgh, he usually doesn't wear them on stage or in publicity photos.
- "Weird Al" Yankovic is the quintessential example of a nerdy musician wearing a pair of nerdy glasses. They were a key asset to his image for a good chunk of his career, until he got LASIK surgery on January 24th, 1998 and changed his look.
- Guitarist Noodles from The Offspring wears the black thick-rimmed variety.
- Singer Dexter Holland was seen wearing the tortoise-shell browline variety when he gave the commencement speech at the 2022 graduation ceremony of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
Pro Wrestling
- Jim Cornette, a non-athletic nerd who made money taking pictures of wrestlers before buying his way into the business with help from his mother. Best known for managing Big Van Vader and The Midnight Express.
- The Dudley Boys were known for wearing big, black, chunky, glasses held together with tape.
- Jamison, the dyed-in-the-wool ultimate mark who dressed like a nerd and wore glasses like a nerd. Several times, the repaired glasses had to be repaired after he got punched... right in the glasses.
- Mike Rotunda when he was Irwin R. Schyster would wear the halfmoon style of glasses, though he would take them off when it came time to compete.
Puppet Shows
- Brains from Thunderbirds. Frames thicker than his fingers, in a dashing powder-blue.
Roleplay
- Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
- Ivy wears a pair of slim browline glasses which, while actually quite stylish, are an easy indicator of her nerdy personality and interests. Funnily enough, both of her parents also wear glasses.
- Both Jacob and Rhys have glasses of the thick-framed variety, and are both intellectually inclined (Jacob via his rigorous studying and Schedule Fanatic tendencies, Rhys via working for the school newspaper as an Intrepid Reporter).
Toys
- Monster High:
- Ghoulia Yelps, the smartest girl in school and Cleo De Nile's best friend and all-around personal assistant, wears a pair of thick, white cat-eye glasses decorated with rhinestones (though not conspicuous enough to push them into Impossibly Tacky Eyewear territory).
- Jackson Jekyll, half of Frankie's main love interest, also counts. He's a timid, oft-bullied intellectual who wears slightly opaque square glasses with thick frames.
Video Games
- Formerly sold as a rare cosmetic item in Animal Jam. Complete with white (or on some variants of the item, yellowish) adhesive tape on the bridge and a pencil behind your animal's ear.
- In Cell To Singularity, the research icon for Dolphin Intelligence is one wearing a pair of big round glasses to emphasize its smarts.
- In Dicey Dungeons, the Inventor sports a pair of orange glasses and is the Gadgeteer Genius among the contestants.
- Disco Elysium:
- In the world of Disco Elysium, the word "binoclard"/"bino" — a French word for a wearer of glasses, with a connotation similar to "four-eyes" — is used whenever, in our world, we would say "geek" or "nerd" (e.g. tabletop role-playing games are described as "binoclard stuff"). This not only shows off the role that Fantasy Counterpart Culture France has had in the game's "immigrant melting-pot fantasy" setting, but also implies that glasses aren't that commonly seen. The link between binoclard-dom and being a geeky loser is so common in the setting that in The Final Cut, the infra-materialist reading group refers to a rival Communist tendency — the Mazovian Economists - as "the Econoclards".
- Kim Kitsuragi has atrocious eyesight which forces him to wear big bino glasses, which he views as "mostly just cumbersome". Despite his elegant dress sense and socially insightful personality, the combination of the glasses and his Seolite ancestry leads to him getting stereotyped as Asian and Nerdy, which he is subtly defensive about. The player can also make fun of his glasses and call him a "bino", though it doesn't get a rise out of him.
- An item in the game is a pair of "Mega-Bino's Prescription Lenses", which are beige plastic square frames with impenetrably thick Coke-bottle lenses. The description comments that beige does not look good on anyone and that they are "nausea-inducing hell glasses", but they give you a +2 boost to your Encyclopedia skill due to letting you "unleash your inner bino".
- Fallout: New Vegas:
- The Four Eyes trait increases the Courier's Perception with glasses, but decreases it without them.
- The Old World Blues DLC introduces Dr. Klein's and Dr. Mobius' glasses, which boost Intelligence and provide bonuses to the Courier's Repair and Explosives skills, respectively.
- Mid Previa of Final Fantasy V, whom the party meets in the Ancient Library, wears glasses with thick orange frames. They also have very large lenses.
- Half-Life:
- Gordon Freeman has a pair of these. However, instead of losing them once he starts ripping zombies apart with a crowbar, he keeps them and becomes a Badass Bookworm.
- The "Walter" scientist model from the first game wears a pair of thick-framed glasses. His successor in Half-Life 2, Dr. Isaac Kleiner, inherits the glasses along with his other physical traits.
- Metroid Prime 4: Beyond: Myles MacKenzie is the team engineer for the survivors of the Tanamaar garrison, and he wears glasses underneath his helmet.
- Mother:
- Lloyd of EarthBound Beginnings wears the round glasses, and they double as Opaque Nerd Glasses. He's extremely pasty, with a strong interest in computer software, and a frequent target of bullying at his elementary school. The MOTHER Encyclopedia mentions that they're his prized possession and that he's never seen without them, and that's a point of pride for him.
- Jeff of EarthBound (1994) wears the classic thick square frames. They go well with his suit and bowtie and bowl cut, and he's a Gadgeteer Genius extraordinaire, They're also Opaque Nerd Glasses, as seen on both his clay model and sprite.
- Paleo Pines: Owynn wears reading glasses, and he's a book-smart expert on dinosaurs.
- Paper Chase: In the Inform version, the psychologist is described as wearing thick spectacles.
- Persona 5:
- The game has an unusual case of Purely Aesthetic Glasses: After the Miscarriage of Justice that lands him on probation at the start of the story, the protagonist starts wearing big, clunky circular glasses to appear more mild-mannered. He takes them off when reading, whenever he's in the Velvet Room, and whenever he's in the Metaverse, and he can see perfectly fine without them.
- An actual case where the user does legitimately need glasses, meanwhile, is the extremely shy and anxiety-ridden Futaba Sakura, a programming prodigy and nerdy gamer who spends all of her time on the computer.
- Parodied with Sheldon from Splatoon, who's not just the owner of the Ammo Knights chain of weapons stores, but an extremly enthusiastic and loquacious weapons nerd. As such, he wears a pair of literal binoculars at all times, having become incredibly nearsighted due to his work as an engineer/mechanic.
Visual Novels
- Liam from Melody wears these. He's also a socially awkward third wheel for Jade and Dash at his introduction, and it is unclear how much of his awkwardness is intentional.
Webcomics
- Avania:
- Junior Warrant Officer Rhys O'Shaughnassy wears large, round-lensed glasses with bulky frames.
- Major Beckinridge of the Royal Corps of Engineers, and Lieutenant Ingwin Iverness of the Black Lanners both wear oversized round hornrim glasses.
- Ministry Secretary Jane Darcy wears half-moon spectacles.
- Cyanide and Happiness: This comic has a nerd character who wears large glasses that make his eyes look very big.
- In El Goonish Shive, this is Invoked as Sarah is given a pair of costume nerd glasses after "proving" her geekiness.
- Tarvek from Girl Genius wore a pair of these as a child, but had upgraded to his current pince nez set by the time he went to Paris to study.
- Homestuck:
- Eridan has large, rounded rectangular glasses with thick black frames, contributing to his Hipster appearance.
- While it can be hard to tell since the bridge isn't visible, John wears rectangular glasses with black frames. Jake has an identical pair.
- Aranea is a lady nerd and exhibits 1970s fashion sense, so she wears thin, white cat-eyes.
- Played with, with Gary of Ménage à 3. He's certainly a geek, if not much of a nerd, and he wears glasses with black plastic frames. But, in keeping with his general dorky image, they're relatively neat and don't look too bad on him.
- Thaddeus Euphemism the goofy scientist from The Petri Dish wears glasses.
- Sabrina Online (and its predecessor Sabrina at See-CAD) has its titular character Sabrina, a anthromorphic skunk who is a massive otaku devoted to Transformers and Amiga computers, wearing her thick massive pair of shades almost constantly. There is some Truth in Television to this though as real life skunks are naturally myopic, and all the skunk characters in the series are seen wearing glasses (with the exception of Tabitha, and Zig-Zag a skunk/tiger hybrid who only wears reading glasses on occasion).
- Amber in early Shortpacked!, until she gets a makeover, with a Lampshade Hanging that she's discovered that nobody even makes glasses like that any more.
- Sleepless Domain: Vedika is a shy and intelligent girl who wears a pair of large round-framed glasses. She takes them off when she transforms into the Magical Girl Mindful Eye.
- Ruby of Sticky Dilly Buns is relatively subtle in her nerdiness, but her outsize round lenses are one sign. However, she's good-looking enough to make them at least a little bit cute.
- In Weak Hero:
- Timothy Park is an information gatherer for Jake Ji, and totes a pair of oversized square glasses.
- Eugene is an obvious nerd and Mr. Exposition, and sports a pair of square browline glasses.
Web Animation
- 13 Cards: Kuromaku is the resident nerd and sports a pair of half-moon glasses.
- Sniffles from Happy Tree Friends is a geeky Gadgeteer Genius who loves superheroes and Star Trek. He wears thick-framed round glasses, complete with tape to hold the lenses together.
Web Original
- Eugene, Matthew Santoro's nerdy clone, wears these.
- Rhett & Link: In the Nerd vs Geek Rap Battle, the nerd character invokes the tape repair part of this trope by claiming "I broke my glasses on purpose, so I could tape 'em together!"
- Squeaks from Scrub Club wears glasses and is described as an "absent-minded professor".
- Whateley Universe: Elaine "Delta Spike" Fleischer wears Nerd Glasses and a lab coat in a deliberate attempt to be sexy. She's also a Genius Ditz known as the "Explosion Queen" around the labs.
Western Animation
- The Amazing World of Gumball:
- The nerdy Insufferable Genius Colin wears rectangular black glasses with very thick frames.
- Joan, the school nurse, wears enormously oversized eye glasses — or rather lenses inexplicably attached to her face.
- Steve Smith of American Dad!. In the unaired pilot he has much nerdier-looking round glasses, but for the main series they were retooled into rectangular black-framed ones, resembling what are commonly known as emo or hipster glasses. He is mentioned as being far-sighted yet doesn't seem to have a problem seeing without them on the occasion that he breaks them. It is likely that he exaggerates his condition because he feels smarter wearing them.
- A rare robotic example; in Animal Mechanicals, Komodo, the Mechanicals' Badass Bookworm, is designed to have chunky, square eye-pieces that look like glasses. They especially pop since they're the only part of his design that's bluenote .
- Tina Belcher, the awkward oldest daughter of Bob Belcher of Bob's Burgers, wears them.
- Penny Sanchez on ChalkZone has quite thick frames, but she's no less adorable with them.
- Jérémie Belpois, the Teen Genius and Mission Control from Code Lyoko. Not too thick, but noticeable.
- Daria's iconic Manstopper Glasses, a pair of large, round glasses. She's an intellectual girl who considers herself to be Surrounded by Idiots.
- Dexter's Laboratory:
- Dexter has thick-framed glasses that double as Eye Glasses. He is also a Child Prodigy and Science Hero and owns a huge underground laboratory.
- Dexter's scientific rival Mandark wears thick-framed glasses as well.
- Mort, Muriel, and Neil Goldman from Family Guy. All three fill out every nerd stereotype you can think of.
- Four Eyes!: Emma and her friends Skyler and Pete all wear glasses, and are considered geeks among the class. However, in Emma's case, her glasses are also a Transformation Trinket that enable her to turn from an alien into a human and keep her alien status hidden from the other kids.
- Hailey's On It!: The eponymous Hailey wears a pair of red cat-eye glasses and is a nerd, being an avid fan of superhero comics and knowing a lot about various types of birds.
- Kim Possible's cousin Larry (voice by Brian Posehn), a video game and computer loving geek who also wears some ugly looking frames.
- Molly of Denali: Atsaq, a doctor, has red-rimmed glasses.
- Willy in My Dad the Rock Star wears them.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- A.K. "Daring Do" Yearling wears these while incognito.
- Rarity wears cat-eye glasses with bright red frames when she's working. Given that she's The Fashionista, though, on her they look less nerdy and more fashionably retro.
- The Owl House: Dr. Camila Noceda wears browline glasses and is rather shy about her more nerdy interests.
Luz: Mom! You were a secret nerd?
- The The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode "Bubblevision" revolves around Bubbles getting glasses to correct her poor eyesight to fight a giant ant; due to how she looks with the glasses on, Blossom and Buttercup repeatedly tease her and call her names like "nerd" and "dork", causing her to feel humiliated. The Professor, however, does not laugh at her and tells her it shouldn't matter what her sisters think and what matters is she needs to fight crime, and she musn't let what they say get to her. She later gets her revenge when the glasses magnify her eye beams and she singes her sisters in the process of frying the monster.
- Mitchell from Ready Jet Go! wears thick-framed glasses, emphasizing his nerd tendencies.
- Recess:
- Butt-Monkey Gus Griswald is a stereotypical geek kid with high-water pants and thick-framed glasses.
- Lovable Nerd Gretchen Grundler has huge thin-framed round glasses that show off her adorkableness.
- Shelton Klutzberry in The Replacements. In one episode it's revealed that they're so heavy that they cripple his posture and distort his voice; without them he instantly turns into an unwilling Chick Magnet.
- Filbert from Rocko's Modern Life is a downright extreme example of this. So much so, in fact, that his signature nerd shades even end up being passed on to his sons.
- Rocky and Bullwinkle: Peabody and Sherman. They're the smartest being in existence and his Lovable Nerd pet human, respectively, and they both wear round glasses.
- Rugrats and All Grown Up!: Chuckie has glasses with extremely thick frames, although as a preliterate child his nerdiness is primarily manifest in his visual appearance (Rummage Sale Reject and later braces) and more timid personality.
- Velma of Scooby-Doo, who serves as The Smart Girl for the Scooby Gang. She's just not Velma without those chunky square lenses.
- As revealed via flashback, Peter Parker from The Spectacular Spider-Man used to have glasses, and he was an awkward and introverted science nerd until he got bitten by the genetically augmented spider that gave him his superpowers.
- In one episode of South Park, Cartman was forced to wear some incredibly huge coke bottle frames, that he was unable to take off because the optometrist stapled them to his head.
- Steven Universe: Connie Maheswaran, a geeky friend of Steven's, initially wears large thin-rimmed glasses. She needs them due to being Blind Without 'Em, but after "An Indirect Kiss", thanks to Steven's healing saliva, her eyesight is restored to normal and she loses the need for them. She still wears them but without the lenses, so her parents don't get upset, but eventually explains it to them after about a year and stops wearing them entirely.
- Storm Hawks:
- Junko wore big round glasses during his childhood on his home terra, where he was seen as a nerd; he sometimes uses them for reading.
- The Terradon scientists' round goggles evoke the appearance of stereotypical nerd glasses and hugely magnify their eyes.
- Tobey McCallister from WordGirl is a nerdy 10-year-old Robot Master who wears a very large pair of round glasses.
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man: As usual, Peter is an awkward and dorky teenager who wears big rounded glasses.
- Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: Brad, who is shy and nerdy, wears glasses.
- Jay of Zeke's Pad wears thick red glasses and is arguably the smartest character in the show (though there isn't really any competition).
Real Life
- Before 2012, new US military recruits who reported to their respective boot camps were not allowed to wear any prescription eyewear they brought with them. Within the first week, they were prescribed a pair of durable yet unflattering thick brown specs called BC (birth control) glasses (or, alternately, BCDs, for BC Devices or BCG for Birth Control Goggles). So named because wearing them in public is the surest form of birth control known to man. Also known as RPG (Rape Prevention Glasses). The official "BCD" prescription eyeglasses were changed in 2012 to a more 2012-friendly eyeglass style. In 2014, they did away with mandating official eyewear in favor of a broad permission on "conservative" civilian prescription eyeglasses for all uniforms, as long as they're not "trendy" or otherwise garish.
- Cat-eye glasses, as mentioned above, were very popular in the 1950s for women (and even for some men: look up, Juan García Esquivel) up to the early 1960s. Many famous stars sported these as well. Nowadays, they indicate someone who is hopelessly, intentionally or "ironically" note unfashionable.
- Jeff Goldblum, Cloudcuckoolander and popularizer of the Gibbering Genius trope in his films, is myopic and prefers the "chunky black frames" style of these offscreen, but plays with this trope in that he prefers the upscale brand Jacques Marie Mage. The glasses became so associated with him in The New '10s that in 2021 he collaborated with JMM on a limited-edition frame, "The Jeff". In a note included with each pair, Goldblum muses that the wearer might start acting like him ("Well, if so, have fun as you try out a few obtuse phrases.").
- Actor Harold Lloyd first helped popularize horn-rimmed glasses in America in the 1920s.
