Prescription glasses: How to find glasses to fit your face shape

Apparently there are four face shapes — round, oval, square and heart — but how do I find the right prescription glasses if my face is a Round-Oval-Heart hybrid?

OPSM

Ever since Top Gun roared into cinemas in 1986, my obsession with wearing aviator sunglasses was set in stone. The journey to get there took a little longer than expected.

Way back in the Dark Ages — aka, when I was in Year 7 and everything I thought I knew about the world invariably came from reading Cleo, Cosmo or Dolly magazine — some Undeniable Truths entered my brain that have been hard to fight off ever since.

Boys can’t commit. Girls need lots of shoes. You should do your makeup according to whether your colouring is classed as Summer, Spring, Winter or Autumn. Women regularly wear green-goop facials, invariably accompanied by cucumber slices on their eyes, mysteriously making them more attractive. And there are four face shapes — round, oval, square and heart — that govern, with absolute authority, which glasses frames you’re supposed to wear.

Coincidentally, Year 7 was also the year I found myself needing glasses, thanks to a monumental growth spurt that contorted my eyeballs to unworkable length — with the whole affair helped along by a long line of myopic ancestors. With my genetic mix, I was always going to end up in a shortsighted squint by the time I hit puberty.

There followed endless conversations with my friends at the bathroom mirror to pigeonhole my already overanalysed teenaged face — and many more confused discussions as we started to shop at glasses stores. Here is where fashion started to clash violently with The Face Shape Quandary. Being entirely mystified and identifying as some kind of Round-Oval-Heart hybrid (definitely not square with my frustratingly undefined jaw), at least I could kid myself into trying most of the fashions of the era, working my way unsatisfyingly from thick Lennon-esque round frames to intellectual lady-scientist oval wire frames, then through to the ubiquitous-at-the-time tortoiseshells.

Glasses hadn’t yet penetrated the ‘90s zeitgeist — you just didn’t see them on celebrities unless they were caught out running to the supermarket in their tracky dacks. Sunglasses, on the other hand, ruled the world. In my world, the sunglasses out there ruled how I saw both sunnies and ordinary frames, even dictating what I wore beyond my face, from clothes to accessories to hairstyles.     

Just like the world around me, I had an on-again, off-again love affair with Ray Ban Wayfarers, especially since they can be so easily converted to prescription wear. They fit right in with my Beatnik, Kerouac-reading phase; my James-Bond mysterious phase; my teen-goth Lost Boys-watching phase; and then of course, my Cindy Crawford red-lipstick phase.

And lastly, there was Top Gun.

Ever since Top Gun roared into cinemas in 1986, and this impressionable little girl insisted on seeing it not once but twice on the big screen, my obsession with wearing aviator sunglasses was set in stone.

However hard I tried, though, this Round-Oval-Heart hybrid just wasn’t ever going to look good in them. Every year, every time I was up for new glasses frames, it became a kind of ritual to sidle over to the aviator frames in OPSM, daring anyone to call me out on the obvious frame mismatch with my face. I would try them on, look in the mirror then whip them off my face before anyone saw. Every year, this relentlessly unforgiving style was out of reach.

Kelly McGillis, the love interest in Top Gun (call sign “Charlie”), with a jaw as nebulous as my own, gave me a brief spark of hope that aviators could be a part of my life, with her markedly modified rounded-corner, square-ish aviators. (Of course, she also gave me hope of romance as a tall girl in a world of shorter people, with her habit of lounging constantly on any objects handy next to a much shorter Tom Cruise. All I need do is lean against things, it seemed. Or recline on motorbikes.)

And then, glory of glories, brands started modifying their aviators to accommodate a whole range of face shapes, paired with better technologies to be able to insert prescription lens into even such a thinly wired frame as these. It took until my thirties, but my obsession was finally rewarded with my very own prescription aviators that didn’t look awful. In fact, they looked rather cool. Or perhaps, as they say in Top Gun, my ego was writing cheques that my body can’t cash. Either way, I was unreasonably happy every time I put them on.

In that vein, I’ve noticed glasses frames these days are experiencing a wonderful new era of fusion and flexibility — and hallelujah to that. Not only can I find aviators deviating from the original strict shape, but other styles — from traditionally rectangular tortoiseshells, to retro cat’s eyes, and those boho Lennon circles that previously did me no favours whatsoever — are softening, modifying and even changing their shape altogether, so you and I can all live our best glasses-wearing lives with maximum choice. We are dictating our choice of frames now; the frames no longer dictate to us.

To add even more sugar to the pudding, I notice that the Law of Four Face Shapes has been softened by the addition of such fun shapes as Teardrop, Oblong and the exciting-sounding Heptagon. (I now heartily wish I were a Heptagon — but my cheekbones refuse to play along.) It all makes sense considering how incredibly wide a net you would have to cast to capture the sheer diversity of ethnic backgrounds in Australia; how mixed a melting pot of facial statistics we enjoy as we all marry, have kids and cross our Round with our Oval, our Square with our Heart shapes. And I don’t even want to know how difficult it gets once you add the statistics on how many of us have watched Top Gun.  

Originally published as Prescription glasses: How to find glasses to fit your face shape