Eyewear History

From Bone to Bold: The Evolution of Sunglasses Through History

Sunglasses are 2,000 years old. The journey from carved walrus ivory in the Arctic to polarized UV400 lenses involves a 19-year-old dropout, a Hollywood Golden Age, and a misconception about dark lenses that still causes eye damage today.

🕑 7 min read📖 History🔬 Science

The Inuit invention

Around 1200 AD, Inuit people in the Arctic created what is now recognised as the earliest surviving eye protection device. Carved from walrus ivory, driftwood, or caribou antler, they were flat pieces with narrow horizontal slits cut across the eye line. They did not use lenses — the narrow slits physically restricted how much light entered the eye, reducing snow blindness on reflective ice and snow in ways that modern photometric testing has confirmed were genuinely effective.

The soot rubbed along the outer surface of some designs absorbed additional reflected light. This was not cosmetic — it was functional engineering using the materials available. The underlying principle (reduce the aperture of incoming light to protect the retina) is identical to what UV400 lenses do today through chemistry rather than mechanics.

China’s smoky quartz glasses

The first tinted lens eye protection appeared in 12th-century China during the Song Dynasty. Chinese judges wore flat planes of smoky quartz — a semi-transparent mineral held in rigid frames — to conceal their eyes during court proceedings. Maintaining an impartial, unreadable expression was considered essential to justice. The lenses were not corrective and provided no UV protection, but they represent the first recorded use of a tinted lens held in a frame, worn intentionally on the face.

18th-century tinted eyeglasses

Corrective eyeglasses had existed since Venice around 1284. The obvious next step was combining the spectacle frame with tinted lenses. English optician James Ayscough began experimenting with blue and green tinted glasses in the 1750s, primarily targeting vision improvement rather than sun protection, but his work produced the hinged temple arm frame architecture that all modern eyewear still uses.

By the early 1800s, tinted glasses had entered European medical practice. Patients being treated for syphilis with silver nitrate developed severe light sensitivity, and tinted spectacles were prescribed to manage it — driving wider commercial acceptance of coloured lenses as functional products.

Sam Foster and mass production, 1929

Everything changed when Sam Foster began selling celluloid-framed sunglasses on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1929, initially for ten cents a pair through the Woolworth chain. They sold immediately and in massive volumes. For the first time in history, sunglasses were a consumer product anyone could buy over the counter. By 1937, Life Magazine reported 20 million pairs sold in the US alone.

Edwin Land and polarized lenses, 1936

Edwin Land, a 19-year-old Harvard dropout, had been running private optics experiments since 1928. By stretching a polymer film to align its molecules in a single direction, he created the first practical synthetic polarizing filter — a material that would block specifically the horizontal light waves responsible for glare, while allowing all other light through. In 1936, he applied this to sunglass lenses, founding the Polaroid Corporation. The same PVA-stretching principle remains the basis of every polarized lens manufactured today.

Ray-Ban Aviators and World War II

Bausch and Lomb designed the Aviator frame in 1936 for US military pilots. When General MacArthur was photographed in Ray-Ban Aviators throughout his Pacific campaign during WWII, the style acquired something no marketing team can manufacture: the association with authority and cool under extreme pressure. The Aviator became the template for the idea that what you wear on your face communicates something about who you are.

The Hollywood era and cultural status

Postwar Hollywood took the association further. Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. Each generation of icons imprinted a specific frame shape with a specific emotional meaning. The Wayfarer, launched in 1952, is reportedly the best-selling sunglass frame in history. Its cultural career spans rebellion, preppy revival, and contemporary minimalism without losing identity.

The UV400 standard

Through most of the 20th century, consumers assumed dark lenses meant better UV protection. Research in the 1970s and 1980s dismantled this assumption definitively: tint darkness and UV blocking are entirely unrelated properties. A dark lens without UV coating is more dangerous than no sunglasses — it causes the pupil to dilate while admitting full UV radiation.

UV400 emerged from this research as a specific, verifiable standard: lenses that block all ultraviolet light up to 400 nanometres, covering both UVA and UVB. It is now the global minimum standard recommended by ophthalmologists and the benchmark every serious eyewear brand builds to.