The mystery of the new glasses
I went to choose new glasses last week, and I found a pair I really liked. They were turquoise and looked really fun and kind of quirky, and I felt uplifted looking at my reflection wearing them. Usually when I choose glasses it's like "OK, if I have to wear glasses, these are about the least unflattering," but this pair I actively liked and could imagine myself wearing even if I didn't need glasses.
A week later I went in to pick them up, and had a disappointing surprise. They were black, not turquoise, and looked very boring and severe compared with what I remembered. They were turquoise on the inside - on the backs of the frames, and the insides of the arms.
I thought there must be some mistake - that they'd made up the glasses with the wrong frames, or with the right style but the wrong colour from a choice of colours. But the lady said they only come in this colour (and I looked on the website later and that concurred). She said that this happens quite often - that people remember the cool colour or pattern from the inside of the frames, and are disappointed when the outside is plainer. (And I did notice that a lot of the frames on display had interesting colours or patterns on the inside only. Seems a very weird trend.) I even wondered if they had been mistakenly put together inside out, but I don't think so - the inside has the nose rests moulded onto it, for example.
I know human memory is very fallible, and I know my own visual memory is particularly bad. But... I really remember them being turquoise. I remember seeing them turquoise in my reflection in the mirror. And, most compellingly, the available frames are all displayed with the fronts facing you, and the arms pointing straight out away from you (so it's not like I could have seen the turquoise insides of the arms when they were folded), and if they'd looked black on the rack, I wouldn't even have picked them up.
When wearing them and looking in the mirror, I can see a faint glint of turquoise coming from the edges of the frame. (And apparently this is the reasoning behind the weird inside-decoration trend - for people who want only a subtle turquoise effect on their black glasses.) It's just about possible that, if I saw them from the inside first and thought they were turquoise, I could have seen them in the mirror and mis-parsed the black as turquoise-in-shadow, like some of those optical illusions where the light blue in shadow is objectively the same colour as the dark blue elsewhere...? But that still doesn't explain why I picked them off the rack in the first place.
I tried to see if I could find the original display frames on the rack, but I couldn't see them, and I didn't want to spend too long looking as I had two bored kids in tow. I'll probably go back once term has started. The lady was very nice and said if I didn't like them I could come back soon and get them changed to a different frame for free (although I think my choice will be very limited because these are among the smallest in terms of frame area, and I wouldn't be able to get these lenses swapped into any bigger frames).
The first image is me wearing the new glasses normally. The second image is me holding them against my face inside-out, and colour-wise they look a lot more like what I remembered.
A week later I went in to pick them up, and had a disappointing surprise. They were black, not turquoise, and looked very boring and severe compared with what I remembered. They were turquoise on the inside - on the backs of the frames, and the insides of the arms.
I thought there must be some mistake - that they'd made up the glasses with the wrong frames, or with the right style but the wrong colour from a choice of colours. But the lady said they only come in this colour (and I looked on the website later and that concurred). She said that this happens quite often - that people remember the cool colour or pattern from the inside of the frames, and are disappointed when the outside is plainer. (And I did notice that a lot of the frames on display had interesting colours or patterns on the inside only. Seems a very weird trend.) I even wondered if they had been mistakenly put together inside out, but I don't think so - the inside has the nose rests moulded onto it, for example.
I know human memory is very fallible, and I know my own visual memory is particularly bad. But... I really remember them being turquoise. I remember seeing them turquoise in my reflection in the mirror. And, most compellingly, the available frames are all displayed with the fronts facing you, and the arms pointing straight out away from you (so it's not like I could have seen the turquoise insides of the arms when they were folded), and if they'd looked black on the rack, I wouldn't even have picked them up.
When wearing them and looking in the mirror, I can see a faint glint of turquoise coming from the edges of the frame. (And apparently this is the reasoning behind the weird inside-decoration trend - for people who want only a subtle turquoise effect on their black glasses.) It's just about possible that, if I saw them from the inside first and thought they were turquoise, I could have seen them in the mirror and mis-parsed the black as turquoise-in-shadow, like some of those optical illusions where the light blue in shadow is objectively the same colour as the dark blue elsewhere...? But that still doesn't explain why I picked them off the rack in the first place.
I tried to see if I could find the original display frames on the rack, but I couldn't see them, and I didn't want to spend too long looking as I had two bored kids in tow. I'll probably go back once term has started. The lady was very nice and said if I didn't like them I could come back soon and get them changed to a different frame for free (although I think my choice will be very limited because these are among the smallest in terms of frame area, and I wouldn't be able to get these lenses swapped into any bigger frames).
The first image is me wearing the new glasses normally. The second image is me holding them against my face inside-out, and colour-wise they look a lot more like what I remembered.