When you think of John Lennon from The Beatles, you're likely to picture him with his circular, wire-rimmed glasses. But at times, he wore , or at least he tried to. They kept pinging out of his eyes.
Why and what Lennon did to help his contacts stick is part history and part vision science. As I propose in , it also involved smoking a lot of pot. Lennon didn't like wearing glasses Before 1967, Lennon was rarely seen in public wearing glasses.
His reluctance to wear them started in childhood, when he was found to be shortsighted at about the . Nigel Walley was Lennon's childhood friend and manager of The Quarrymen, the forerunner to The Beatles. Walley : "He was as blind as a bat—he had glasses but he would never wear them.
He was very vain about that." In 1980, Lennon magazine: "I spent the whole of my childhood with [..
.] me glasses off because glasses were sissy." Even during extensive touring during , Lennon never wore glasses during live performances, unlike his hero Buddy Holly.
Then Lennon tried contacts ...
ping! Roy Orbison's guitarist introduced Lennon to contact lenses in 1963. But Lennon's foray into contact lenses was relatively short-lived. They kept on falling out—including while , (when a fan threw a jelly baby on stage that hit him in the eye) and .
Why? That's likely a combination of the lenses available at the time and the shape of Lennon's eye. The soft, flexible contact lenses worn by millions today were not commercially available until . In the 60s, .