So, a week or two ago I ordered myself another pair of cheap glasses from that nine dollar glasses website. I was browsing the styles and found one I liked. I started looking at the options you can get for it and I became intruded by the color lens selection. You could get them tinted for sunglasses and so on. One of the colors was 'Solid Red'. By golly, I thought, that sounds spiffy. I had an image in my mind of a pair of glasses like Cyclops from the X-men has. Or, if they are not that shade red, then maybe the amber-vision sort of shade as favored by 70's porn stars.
So two weeks passed and I get home last night gleeful to see my package in my mail. I opened it up, and gazed down, vaguely appalled. For the glasses were not red… they were pink. They were truly a pair of rose-tinted glasses. Now, I have to admit the fit perfectly and I'll be damned if the faint pink tinge actually does made the world look a little better. A little more clear and a little more sharp.
So, as far as functionality goes, I like the glasses. However, I have to equate in the gayness factor. Pink glasses? On a dude? GAY! Yes. It screams gay. I thought that maybe, just maybe, due to my red hair and pale skin I might be able to pull it off and still come off as heterosexual. I'll wear them for a little bit, however if I am ever in the airport men's room and a foot starts creeping from the next stall, I am never wearing them again.
On a scale of 1-10 YOU judge the gheyness of these glasses.
(Btw My hair looks horrid in this pic because it was a hundred fucking degrees in here and humid and I was sweating to boot. So ignore the bum-hair)
2026 Update
Dialing back to September 2007: Ed paid nine dollars for Cyclops-approved red lenses and instead got the world through a Pepto-Bismol filter.
Ah, 2007: when you could order glasses on the internet for nine dollars, wait two weeks by the mailbox, and be genuinely surprised by the color. Now we can get lenses sent overnight by drone but still can't trust a fabric swatch on a phone screen. Ed's panic over wearing pink is wonderfully quaint — back then a color could threaten your entire perceived orientation, and a men's room foot creep was the catastrophic worst-case scenario. These days the same selfie would be a TikTok trend: 'POV: you ordered red but the universe said soft masculinity.' The real changes are everywhere: nobody calls anything 'gheyness,' we call it a vibe; photos are less about documenting bad hair days and more about constructing a personal brand; and nine-dollar glasses have been replaced by subscription frames at modern luxury prices, still arriving in colors that lie to your face. The more things change, the more the website remains determined to betray your expectations.
“2007 Ed, did you genuinely believe 'Solid Red' would arrive as an X-Men prop rather than a waitress's Valentine's Day accessory — or was the real gamble that your red hair and pale skin would somehow out-charm a pair of pink lenses?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I genuinely believed it, and that’s the sad part. In my head I was one click away from Cyclops, maybe even a little bit of that 70’s porn-star amber if the shade went sideways. I did not once stop to think that “Solid Red” on a cheap website might mean “the color of a Pepto-Bismol bottle.” So no, the gamble wasn’t my hair and pale skin out-charming anything. That was just my desperate, post-delivery bargaining. You know, the kind where you stand in front of the mirror and squint and tell yourself maybe it looks ironic. It doesn’t. I look like a strawberry who lost a fight. But hell, the world does look a bit friendlier through them, so I’ll be damned if I’m not halfway to keeping them. Just don’t test me near any airport restrooms. On the gheyness scale, I’m giving myself a solid 6.9, and that’s only because I’m too stubborn to admit it’s a 9.
