Adjusting Your Glasses

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Oh... looks like your glasses are sliding down your nose. You'd better correct them—But wait! Don't reach for those frames just yet. How you adjust your glasses speaks volumes of your character - at least if you're a fictional one. Here, we've provided a helpful list of the myriad ways to correct your spectacles, from which you can pick the one that suits you the best.


1. By the arms

Adjusting your glasses by their arms, using both hands, conveys that you're either not used to wearing eyeglasses, or taking exceptional care with them. In any case, it is Moe, and as such usually the province of the Meganekko. The one-handed variant, however, has come to be known as a somewhat sly gesture, but more softspoken Megane have been known to utilize it without mischievous intent.


2. By the corner

Holding one lens or hinge between the thumb and the forefinger is almost singularly reserved for The Professor types. Nerd Glasses and Purely Aesthetic Glasses are—almost by definition—adjusted this way. This is also the only way to adjust your High-Class Glass, but we can't say if there's a deeper meaning to the connection.

Adjusting your glasses by both lenses is only reserved for the highest echelons of geekdom, and those who wear goggles. (Sometimes these two groups overlap.)


3. By the bridge

Pushing your glasses back up your nose by their bridge, using one or two fingers, has more conflicting interpretations. In the West, this gesture is generally associated with Nerd Glasses and the socially inept, but in the realm of Anime and Manga, doing this usually means that you're a Badass Bookworm. Pushing your glasses up the nose is also known to trigger a staggering majority of Scary Shiny Glasses.

In more juvenile comedies, this is also a way of Flipping the Bird without technically doing so, intentional or otherwise.


4. Other ways

After what we've covered thus far, the gestures that remain tend to be so alien as to be relegated to some singular character's idiosyncrasies. Look through these examples for some truly exotic ways to adjust your glasses.


As you can see, adjusting your glasses can be such a powerful characterization tool that you shouldn't reserve doing it only for when your glasses actually need adjusting. If you're wearing Stoic Spectacles or are just painfully shy, you can always just adjust your glasses in lieu of a proper greeting. If you want to underline the seriousness of the situation, adjust your glasses - Glasses Pull used to be popular for this, but nowadays it's a largely Discredited Trope. Don't know how to express your feelings? Adjust your glasses. It's an act with uses above and beyond just correcting your corrective lenses.

Examples of Adjusting Your Glasses include:

By the arms

Anime and Manga

Western Animation

  • Arthur apparently does this as a nervous habit. In later episodes, it becomes his "tell" and if he does it then you know he's lying or at least not being entirely truthful.

By the corner

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • Clark Kent is often seen adjusting his glasses this way, especially in Post-Crisis stories where Clark was given a more aggressive personality. Often used as a punctuation for his snarking.

Music

Video Games

  • As seen above, Martin Summer does this constantly in Hotel Dusk: Room 215.
  • The concise Shizune of Katawa Shoujo often poses this way
  • Ema Skye in the Ace Attorney series. Unusual in that she very rarely wears the glasses over her eyes, so the adjustment is mostly for the sake of adjusting.
  • Jeff from EarthBound is doing this as his pose on his Super Smash Bros Brawl trophy.
    • There is also an NPC in Mother 3 who does this for his talking animation.

Web Original

  • The Nostalgia Critic has a habit of doing it whenever people with glasses get treated badly in the movies he reviews.

Western Animation

By the bridge

Anime and Manga

Film

  • Justin Hammer does it this way in Iron Man 2, showing that he has a lot of nervous energy and is an awkward man.
  • Now And Then: Nerdy Morton does this as a child while saying "hello dear" to Chrissy, and it becomes his defining characteristic so we later recognize him as an adult once he's married to her. Awww.

Live Action Television

  • Hiro in Heroes does this - it does a good job straddling the western 'dork glasses' and eastern 'serious moment.' It also lampshades itself from time to time, like when Hiro meets his younger self, and they both adjust their glasses at the same time.
  • In Psychoville, the younger Jeremy does this multiple times during his flashback of Ravenhill.

Video Games

Other ways

Anime and Manga

  • In One Piece, Kuro adjust his glasses by pushing up on the bottoms of the lenses with the heels of his hands, an early hint to the fact the he is used to wearing clawed gauntlets.
  • In Black Butler, William T Spears uses his death scythe to adjust his glasses.
    • At one point, Sebastian uses a violin bow to adjust his glasses while teaching Ciel the violin in Episode 13.

Literature

  • In The Girl With The Silver Eyes, Katie is used to lifting her glasses via telekinesis. After she finds others like her, they jointly complain about how frustrating it is to try to remember to do it with your hands when it's so obvious and easy to do it the normal way - mentally!

Western Animation

  • Used as an off-joke in The Simpsons episode "The Boy Who Knew Too Much", when the Blue Haired Lawyer questions Freddy Quimby on the defense stand, he has to remove his glasses and quickly wipe them with a handkerchief when they become and impromptu spit-shield, due to his client flying into rage.

Bonus Points if you wear glasses and were trying all of these methods as you read them.
Bonus bonus points if you put a pair on just to do that.