Dear Movie Makeover Montages, Who Says Girls in Glasses Can't Be Beautiful?

I was diagnosed with myopia, or nearsightedness when I was eight years old and have been wearing glasses ever since. Round frames, square, thin, thick, I’ve worn them in every color you can imagine and, after more than one incident, become an expert at gluing broken frames back together. But I’ve been watching teen movies and romcoms even longer than that, and after loving iconic films like The Princess Diaries and She’s All That, one thing I could never quite shake was the implications of their respective movie montages—that is, you can’t become a princess, be valued as a functioning member of society, or be treated as an equal unless you ditch those frames on your face. 

Sure, maybe I’m overthinking such a minuscule change to a person’s look. Maybe it’s not as complicated as all that, but I’d argue that the history of characters wearing glasses in movies certainly is. 

On one hand, sometime in history, someone decided that glasses implied higher than average intelligence. After all, wearing glasses is a luxury and a privilege in a lot of ways. It implies you or your parents are within good distance of an optometrist and that you have the money, medical benefits, and insurance to pay for tests, frames, and lenses. And the more money you have access to, the more likely you are to be educated, to read and write a lot, and to be perceived as intelligent. Though an easy fix to what is nothing more than a largely genetic medical condition, glasses were once considered a symbol of wealth, power, and intelligence. 

By the time the mid-20th century rolled around, however, this stereotype had transformed into the nerd/dork/geek character that made glasses synonymous with being unconventional, weird, weak, unpopular, and intelligent, yes, but ultimately, ugly and undesirable. See: Velma from Scooby-Doo, Steve Urkel from Family Matters, Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker in the first Spider-Man (2002) (although I guess you can’t fight crime effectively if you’re worried about your glasses falling off, so I’ll let that one slide). 

They even tried to fool us into thinking Natalie Portman, Barbara Streisand, Michelle Pfeiffer was ugly just because they wore glasses and frumpy clothes in Hesher (2010), The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), and Batman Returns (1992), respectively. 

So the fact that it became an essential ingredient to the “before” portion of a film character’s appearance before their transformative makeover montage is a no-brainer. It makes the moment more visually entertaining, more dramatic, and easier to imagine for ourselves if only we had the resources. 

But it’s not without its problematic tendencies. 

The Princess Diaries is probably the biggest offender of this trope. I’m a sucker for a Cinderella-esque story but it’s hard to watch Mia have a low opinion of herself and be considered unpopular in school just because of her bushy eyebrows, curly mop, and, of course, ill-fitting glasses when I had all three after puberty (news flash: this did not help my already low self-esteem in a majority white middle school). 

I know they wanted a dramatic transformation but all her stylist Paolo had to do was give Mia a pair of glasses better suited to her face shape, as well as a good cut, deep conditioner, and a wide-toothed comb to her curls, which weren’t bad, to begin with. Sure, it doesn’t sound as sexy as the Brazilian blow-out and contacts she ended up getting but seriously, what did this type of transformation to make her into the average beautiful person have anything to do with how well she could rule a country? 

And don’t even get me started on Laney Boggs from She’s All That. Honestly, while she stunned in that red dress, I loved her just as much, if not more in her glasses, plaid shirts, overalls, and the iconic falafel hat (and not just because I wore similar outfits in high school). Besides the fact that the movie is just gross from the get-go, I wished that Freddie Prinze Jr.’s character had realized her true beauty and value before she “fixed” her external one, and certainly before she discovers her confidence on her own. In the end, she gets the guy but he’s the one who dictates what he likes, what will make her desirable, and gives her a makeover that was never really her choice. 

On the surface, these movies were entertaining. But growing up and watching makeover montages like these takeaway girls’ specs over and over again, all I understood was that I could only be beautiful if I stopped wearing my glasses. That I could only be valued if I looked like everyone else with straight hair and contacts or no vision problems at all. It insinuates that girls can’t look or be both beautiful and smart, which, as we know, is a classic misogynistic tactic to fit women into one-dimensional boxes. Blondes are dumb, brunettes are dark and mysterious, and glasses wearers are smart or geeky depending on how attractive we already are without them, right? 

That’s really my biggest problem with makeover montages, that the changes are so predictable, formulaic, and conforming to the male gaze and our Western standard of beauty, that the messages they perpetuate end up hurting everyone. There’s nothing wrong with changing your look or buying new clothes or even ditching your glasses as long as it’s something you want to do, not because Hollywood says that you should. Interestingly, montages seem to be going out of style on their own but we still have a lot of work to do in embracing what makes someone attractive or valuable or worthy of a story that isn’t based on what cis white men want or value (and we don’t even touch the fact that the leading ladies of these kinds of movies are always white). 

Now at twenty-one, thirteen years after I got my first pair of frames, I’m just grateful I was able to grow out of the toxic mindset of my favorite childhood movies, become bigger than stereotypes, and embrace my appearance in every way that makes me different, no matter how long it took me to get there. And as long as we view these montages and the movies they come from with more critical eyes, I have a feeling future generations will do the same. 

Because glasses are beautiful, they always have been, and I’m living proof.