Who Invented Sunglasses?

Long before they came to symbolize glamour, rebellion or all-around cool, sunglasses served far more serious purposes. Inuit hunters wore their homemade version to fight the blinding arctic glare. Early Chinese judges donned dark glasses in the courtroom so their eyes wouldn’t give away what they were thinking. World War I fighter aces strapped on tinted goggles to keep the sun and wind out of their eyes. Headache sufferers bought them in search of relief, syphilis patients to reduce the light sensitivity related to their illness, and people who were blind wore them simply to cover their eyes.

As the magazine Business Week bluntly put it in 1947, “Dark glasses were once the badge of the blind man. Hollywood turned them into a fad; today they are a feminine style item in avid demand by young and old.”

Of course, they weren’t just for women. The history and evolution of sunglasses crosses genders, centuries and cultures, with more than a few eye-opening surprises along the way.

Many historians credit the Inuit and other Indigenous people in the Arctic with inventing what were, in effect, the first sunglasses—though they contained no glass at all. In a practice believed to date back thousands of years, they crafted protective eyewear with narrow horizontal slits to reduce the blinding glare of sunlight reflecting off the snow and ice. Surviving examples of these so-called Inuit sun goggles reveal resourceful use of available materials, including ivory, bone, wood and leather.

The Chinese began making dark glasses, using smoky quartz rather than glass for lenses, sometime during the Song Dynasty (A.D. 960 to 1279), according to British science historian Joseph Needham. Because they concealed the wearer’s eyes, some judges adopted them to “disguise from litigants their reaction to the evidence,” Needham wrote in his landmark multi-volume study Science and Civilisation in China.

Since spectacles with corrective lenses likely didn’t appear until the late 13th century in Italy, sunglasses actually predate them, contrary to the common presumption. That checks out, says Jessica Glasscock, an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design and author of Making a Spectacle: A Fashionable History of Glasses (2021): “You can create sunglasses with more primitive techniques.”

The next major leap in sunglass technology appears to have taken place in Venice, where the city’s renowned glassmakers finally added actual glass to the equation. In her 2020 book Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization, Cornell University anthropologist Meredith Small asserts that it’s “certain” that Venetians invented sunglasses: “In the 17th century, they manufactured tinted lenses meant for entertainment or to hide behind,” she wrote. “These lenses, set in metal frames or a monocle, were multi-faceted and reflected multiple images, like the eye of a fly.”

By the 18th century, Venetian opticians were producing emerald-green lenses for ship commanders and others at sea. “The idea was to dampen the reflection of the sun on the water,” Small explains. These tinted spectacles came to be known as “Goldoni glasses,” after the celebrated Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni.

Around 1750, James Ayscough—an English optician often credited as the inventor of modern sunglasses—began advocating for tinted lenses, particularly in shades of green and blue. In his 1752 book, he argued that, “the common white glass gives an offensive glaring light, very prejudicial to the eyes, and on that account green and blue glass has been advised, though they make every object appear with their own hue.” Also a pioneer in the design of lenses to correct vision deficiencies, Ayscough believed that tinting them offered the added benefit of relieving eye strain—an early step toward the fusion of eye protection and optical correction that eventually led to prescription sunglasses.

Ayscough would not have called his invention “sunglasses.” While the term did exist in the 18^th century, it referred to something entirely different—either a “burning glass” used to concentrate sunlight for igniting fires, or a telescope filter for safely observing the sun. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known use of “sunglasses” in the modern sense—eyewear for shielding the eyes from sunlight—didn’t appear until 1817.

Tinted glasses gained popularity not only among Europe’s elite, but also across the Atlantic in the American colonies, where both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were known to own pairs. If fact, Franklin’s own Pennsylvania Gazette featured some of the earliest advertisements for tinted eyewear. A 1755 notice announced the arrival of “green spectacles” imported from England, and a 1758 ad promoted “true Venetian green spectacles for weak and watery eyes.”

Jefferson and Franklin were, in a sense, early adopters, as they were with so many other things. It would be more than a century before sunglasses caught on widely with everyday Americans.

For decades, sunglasses were marketed primarily for their utility—reducing glare, preventing headaches and easing eye strain. Eye doctors prescribed them for a wide range of light-sensitivity issues, caused by everything from hay fever to syphilis.

But it didn’t take long for the fashion world to catch on. By 1884, a newspaper in an Austin, Texas, newspaper noted that a local optician was stocking smoked glasses that not only alleviated headaches but were “stylish and cute,” predicting they’d soon become “quite the rage.” Tinted lenses, once strictly therapeutic, were evolving into coveted accessories.

Sunglasses got their biggest boost from the silver screen—specifically, from silent film stars who began wearing them in the early 20th century. Some accounts suggest they did so to shield their eyes from the intense lighting used on movie sets. But as Glasscock notes, the trend largely coincided with the industry’s move from the East Coast to Hollywood in the 1910s. She suspects the harsh desert sun in Southern California also played a role.

Whatever the reason, it wasn’t long before film stars were wearing sunglasses everywhere—not just for eye protection, but to project an aura of mystery and celebrity. The glasses became both a shield and a spotlight, signaling that the wearer was someone worth gawking at. Around the same time, baseball players began adopting them for more utilitarian reasons. In 1912, Pittsburgh Pirates manager Fred Clarke invented flip-down sunglasses that could be attached to their caps, offering on-field protection with a simple, practical flourish.

The film stars of the 1930s and later decades carried on the tradition, helping fuel a national craze. In 1938, Life magazine reported that “dark glasses have become a favorite affectation of thousands of women all over the U.S.” Some 20 million pairs were sold in the previous year, the magazine noted—though only about a quarter of wearers actually needed them for any sort of medical purpose.

Other celebrities and newsmakers also joined in. In World War II, the image-conscious General Douglas MacArthur was rarely photographed without his signature aviator sunglasses. Such glasses had their own lineage, tracing back to the flying goggles worn by pioneering airplane pilots in open cockpits.

One of the United States’ most lasting contributions to the sunglasses boom was democratizing access. Around 1929, entrepreneur Sam Foster began selling sunglasses for just 10 cents a pair—initially marketed as a novelty item for children, then quickly embraced by adults. By the late 1930s, his Foster Grant Company and its competitors were selling millions of pairs annually, bringing sun protection—and a dash of style—to the masses.

“The 1930s sunglasses were plastics in an array of toylike colors and were sold at the corner drugstore,” Glasscock observes in her book. “This meant they could be bought in multiples on a whim far more cheaply than any other accessory.”

Though styles have evolved, sunglasses have never fallen out of fashion. In the 1950s, Hollywood cemented its cool factor by putting them on screen icons like Marlon Brando and James Dean—emblems of youthful rebellion. Over the decades, countless public figures have made sunglasses a defining part of their image: Jackie Kennedy Onassis with her big round frames, John Lennon with his wire-rimmed granny glasses, Elton John with his innumerable whimsical pairs, Joe Biden with his trademark aviators and late-era Elvis Presley with gold-plated shades, one pair of which fetched $159,900 at a 2018 auction. Cultural movements and archetypes have embraced them too: Beatniks, Black Panthers, jazz musicians, Mafia dons and Secret Service agents—perhaps the only accessory they share.

“Every level of the market, every season, every year, from subcultures and street fashion, to couture and luxury branding,” Vanessa Brown writes in her 2015 book Cool Shades: The History and Meaning of Sunglasses, “sunglasses are an obvious sign of cool which seems to have incredible staying power.”