Glasses make people seem less intelligent, attractive: study

Wearing glasses to make yourself seem smarter? You may want to consider tossing those fake glasses, or trading in your prescription ones for contacts.

A new study published in Cureus by researchers from the University of Jordan found that people who wear glasses are perceived to be less intelligent, less confident and less attractive.

Researchers gathered 517 college-age people in Jordan — 66.9% who didn’t wear glasses and 33.1% who did — to find out how wearing glasses affects self-esteem measures.

The participants were shown photos of four people both with and without glasses — a total of eight photos — and were asked to rate the attractiveness, confidence and intelligence of the people in the photos on a scale of 1 to 10.

Results showed that the images of people without glasses ranked higher than those with glasses. The participants who did wear glasses tended to give higher scores to the pictures of people with glasses, but those who didn’t wear glasses did not do the same with images without glasses.

The study also noted that certain factors weren’t taken into consideration when determining attractiveness, including the frame of the eyeglasses and facial features.

The researchers hope that this study will encourage people who actually need glasses to wear them.

“Sight correction with eyeglasses carries associated social and personality effects on the wearer,” the study said. “Studying these effects may provide an insight into how to increase compliance with these corrective devices.”

About 75% of adults worldwide use some sort of vision corrective products, and 64% of them wear glasses, according to the Vision Council.

However, the study suggests that not everyone agrees with Western standards of fashion, and results differ based on cultural associations with eyeglasses.

“The effect of eyeglasses has a different impact on the social traits of wearers, depending on social and ethnic variables,” the study says.

The research notes that this particular study was done on Jordanian college students of Arabian ethnicity, and previous studies done in Western populations had conflicting results.

“Compared to Western studies where eyeglasses have a positive impact on the intelligence image of a person, our study that included participants of Arabian ethnicities rated images with glasses with lower intelligence scores compared to images without glasses, which might represent a sort of social stigma related to wearing glasses among Jordanians,” researchers wrote.

However, previous studies “assessing the impact of eyeglasses on self-image showed the negative impact of eyeglasses on attractiveness,” which mirrors the findings of this study.