Wholesale Sunglasses And The Allure Of The Hidden
They may be healthy for the eyes and make driving safer by reducing glare, but let’s face it, a lot of us buy sunglasses for completely non-practical reasons. Long associated with luxury, fame, the sun-drenched days of summer, and more than a little all-around glamor, sunglasses are purchasable “cool.” The sales of millions of both cheap and expensive wholesale sunglasses are assured not by their practical benefits, but by the fact that they make almost all of us seem a bit sexier.
The earliest use of sunglasses is hard to date. However, forerunners of today’s shades go back as far as medieval China where judges wore spectacles made of smoked quartz to conceal their reactions. The direct ancestors of today’s shades, however, were created by English inventor James Ayscough, who experimented with tinted glasses which were later prescribed for people with health conditions that made them sensitive to light. With the arrival of the twentieth century and mass media culture, sunglasses became popular among actors in the very new movie industry. Some say they wore them to avoid recognition by fans when out in public, and some argue it was to conceal the fact that the ultra-powerful lighting used in early filmmaker left them with badly reddened eyes.
In any case, sunglasses didn’t become truly popular until the late twenties, when a previously less than successful entrepreneur in the field of women’s hair products began experimenting with injection molding equipment to make rapidly produced sunglasses. Sam Foster, who had a concession at the Atlantic City Boardwalk Woolworth Department Store (location, location, location!), began marketing the glasses to squinting beach-goers under the name Foster Grant. Though it was