Specs Appeal: Would you wear fake glasses?

Prior to getting my eyes sliced open and remoulded with a laser beam in 2011, I couldn't understand why anyone who didn't need glasses was so enamoured with the idea of wearing them.

I'd spent the 13 years previous having people ask to try on my specs in all sorts of situations and talking longingly about how they wished they needed them, and how much smarter they looked with a pair of eye frames perched on their nose, and how they thought they might need an eye test, actually, and even if it turned out they didn't need glasses for their fractionally less than perfect vision they might get fake ones with non-prescription lenses.

“Is that a thing? Would an optician just put, like, clear lenses in frames for me?” I was asked frequently, whereupon I'd have to resist the temptation to point out that most glasses had clear lenses – y'know, to help with the seeing through them thing – and since I'd always had to have a hefty prescription in mine, how the feck would I know if they'd go along with the non-prescription fakery?!

Oh, it's all coming back to me now. Deep breaths.

Anyway, I recently ran into a Vision Express (I'm not endorsing them, other opticians are available, etc) to hide from from a cloudburst and kill a bit of time by indulging in what had been one of my very favourite things to do pre-op: trying on ALL the glasses. And, as had been the case before my surgery, they were mostly just meh on me.

Then I tried on these bad boys and it was all change.

Holy sheet. They were AMAZING. They suited my face so well that I actually looked better with them than without, and they were just big enough to tap into the current fake hipster/meedja glasses trend without making me look like a Late Late Show audience member circa 1992. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't still thinking about them – a lot – but at the guts of two hundred smackers, they're too rich for my don't-actually-need-glasses-anymore blood. If they'd been around the twenty quid mark, I'd be wearing them right now.

I miss having glasses to hide behind and, having spent most of my adult life wearing them, I still sometimes don't feel quite like me without a pair of specs. I can kind of see (ho ho) a pair of non-prescription glasses in my future for times when I want to feel more myself, but what I want to know is this.

Would you wear glasses if you didn't really need to?