You didn’t like how you looked? To change the real you?
I’ve never felt that anything about my body defined who I am, but that seems to be a minority view. Probably has something to do with hard headedness in general.
As someone who wore glasses as a kid (along with a patch to help fix two lazy eyes – I looked like a mess), I can tell you Joyce that glasses are NOT part of your face – if you don’t like the pair you’re wearing, get new ones! (My pair looked ugly af, but for some reason 8yo me thought they looked really cool xD)
Devin
This is exactly what I was thinking. You get to change your face if you don’t like it, and you get to pick part of your face! How is that not a blessing?
Yet_One_More_Idiot
I was so lucky – I wore my glasses for a year, maybe two, and once my lazy eyes were fixed I haven’t had to wear glasses at all since (I’m now 38). My dad, on the other hand, did not wear his prescribed specs as a kid and has paid for it with a lifetime of having to wear them (also it would’ve helped if he’d agreed to have the surgery to fix his squint, apparently it has to be done when you’re young enough to adjust).
Roborat
If you were wearing two eye patches, I don’t think there was much need for the glasses.
Funny thing is, I was the opposite. Like, I wore glasses from age 13 to 25, and I never ever liked how I looked in glasses as much as I did without. It just didn’t feel like me. And contacts were mostly out, my eyes are too sensitive and it was uncomfortable (not a mental squeamishness, but they felt physically bad for the first hour or so of the day every day.)
I ended up being very fortunate enough to afford laser vision correction, which obviously isn’t an option for everyone, but I like how I look a lot better now.
Ditto. As a result, I need prescription sunglasses for work. Bouncers wearing regular glasses get laughed at.
Zaxares
Ditto too! I have the kind of eyes that squeeze shut the moment something comes near them, so contacts are right out for me. I’ve worn glasses since I was… 7? Maybe 6? Either way, a long, long, loooong time. Were it not for baby photos, I wouldn’t even remember what I looked like without them.
Also, I’m not sure if Joyce’s resistance to getting glasses is because she feels it changes a fundamental aspect of “her look”, but if so, I wonder how she’s going to cope as she gets older and one day looks in the mirror and sees a completely different person staring back at her.
For me, it was the annoyance of having to poke myself (gently) in the eye every morning and then pull them out at night. Glasses are easy to take off and put on quickly as needed. Contacts aren’t. There’s also the fact that my prescription is light enough that it’s no big deal if I go without, so it was often easier to just skip it than see clearly.
Exactly my thought process. “What about contacts? Oh wait wait wait nevemind.”
I remember when my wife first got contacts (also in college!) it took her… an hour (or maybe more?) to put them in the first time and she wasn’t nearly as squeamish as Joyce.
(Of course now it’s basically second nature to her and can pop them in and out super quick but I still find it pretty weird.)
I got my first contacts in 7th grade and cannot for the life of me imagine myself wearing glasses. Maybe it’s easier when you’re younger, but for me it was always just routine.
When I was at school one of my friends needed to leave and go to A&E because her contact tore as she was taking it out leaving half a glass lens against her eyeball ? She was fine but the idea of a jagged glass edge just balanced on an eyeball squicks me out quite a lot.
With soft lenses (which is what pretty much everybody has) it’s very, very soft and flexible plastic. If one tears, you just reach in and grab the other half. I’ve had it happen, it’s mostly annoying because you need a new lens, which you may not have handy.
Hard lenses are more rigid plastic, not glass.
foamy
I hear you but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I put contacts in my eyes anyway.
I’ll stick with glasses. Sucks for sports, though.
Hermitess
Hard contacts definitely used to be glass.
According to Wikipedia: “Although Louis J. Girard invented a scleral contact lens in 1887,[13] it was German ophthalmologist Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick who in 1888 fabricated the first successful afocal scleral contact lens.[14] Approximately 18–21 mm (0.71–0.83 in) in diameter, the heavy blown-glass shells rested on the less sensitive rim of tissue surrounding the cornea and floated on a dextrose solution.”
A few other Google sources confirm the timeline and material as well.
LiamKav
Yeah, but unless Miri is actually 90 years old then its pretty unlikely that their friend had glass contacts.
Hermitess
My reply was more to Victor who said they didn’t think they’d ever been glass, rather than Miri. I was just pointing out that they really had been, originally. My mum has talked about glass contacts from the 60s-70s, but those may have been a hard plastic and just called glass, IDK.
Cimorene
My mom’s first contacts were glass D: they’ve always icked me out
I’m glad I missed the glass contacts, but my first contacts were hard plastic. They took some getting used to and could be a bit painful at times. Then I fell asleep wearing them. I have never felt anything as painful as when I woke up the next day. I got the lenses out, but all I could do was walk around blind, crying hard for hours. Had to take the day off from school, but couldn’t enjoy it.
Getting glasses for the first time is dope; I remember looking at trees and seeing individual leaves. Going from low-res to high-res but… like… REALITY
I got my first set in 3rd Grade and I can still remember just boggling at the fact that street signs could in fact *be read from across the intersection* on the ride back home.
That was around twenty-five years ago. I don’t think I’ll ever forget, at this point.
But Joyce is not 40+, and we don’t know how long her vision has been … let’s say, ‘sub-standard’. If she’d been in a public or parochial school instead of being home-schooled, she might have been struggling to see the blackboard for years.
And for the record, I’ve been a four-eyes guy since roughly 3rd grade, when it turned out I was having trouble seeing the blackboard clearly.
deliverything
While Tim was probably being self-referential… Compare the ratio of real life time to DoA time and extrapolate, and Joyce would have been born *does a lazy barely-trying calculation* about three and a half real life centuries ago.
They don’t like change…as someone who has two people who hate change to the point that they complain about new neighbors and new doctors it’s tough to live with them and tough for them to accept that things aren’t always the same even after just a couple of months!
I don’t get it either, but I’ve been wearing glasses since I was three or four. I consider my glasses part of my face, and it’s weird when I look at pictures of me when I was a baby and didn’t wear glasses.
I was about her age when I got my glasses. Thing is, I didn’t know I can’t really see. I was VERY rectulant to wear glasses. Until I got out of the shop, looked around and thought “wow. THAT’S what the world looks like?!”
Took me a week or so to openly admit it though. Teenager and pride and stuff.
I think it’s def more about not liking change and having dealt with so much change lately, her familiar reflection was one thing she had control over, and now she’s lost that too.
They would rather not *change*. They would rather not recognise that something was *wrong* with them. They would rather not have to accept the relatively minor inconveniences of dealing with this new THING. Once you are used to it, it will be no big deal, but it’s like accepting new limitations on how you can move and act and that this thing will be part of your life no matter what.
It is easier to accept getting glasses as a child when you haven’t fully formed a concept of your identity and what you look like. Glasses do change how you look and how you are perceived. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is different.
The new clarity can override all the other emotional stuff because ‘WOW, I CAN SEE SO MUCH BETTER!’ but you’ve got to actually try the glasses for that.
Well, for now she could just wear them in the lecture halls so she can see the board. But then being able to see clearly is addictive, she might be afraid of getting hooked.
Probably a conservatively styled thin wire frame, similar to Dorothy’s and Jocelyne’s but maybe a bit more rectangular instead of an oval. Joyce seems like she’ll lean toward the least noticeable frame that fits her.
Weird. I’ve worn glasses since High School, and never once thought of them this way. How are glasses any different from the clothing you decide to wear each day, or how you style your hair? Your face is your face, Joyce, unless you get horribly disfigured in an accident.
They’re phrasing it in a rather strong way, but I agree with the basic sentiment; after wearing glasses for so long, seeing myself in the mirror or a photograph without them just looks weird. Like it’s someone else.
I mean, if you see someone in uniform for decades, or they cut their hair short after having it long for ages, doesn’t that look weird for a while until you adjust to the new image? It’s the same sentiment, really; it just tends to be more pronounced with glasses for various reasons.
The last time I got my driver’s license renewed, they had me take them off. I found out that without them, and at the right angle and lighting (not what I usually see in the mirror), I look a lot more like one of my brothers than I previously thought.
It’s a good day to wax on from my arm-chair… gather round and chew the salt.
It seems like a common conceit to identify the image of the self most strongly with the perception of ones own face. (at least in modern times) Firstly there’s Pareidolia, which is heavily selected by evolution for face recognition. So we’re hard-wired to see faces everywhere and perceive it as important. This is of course because (secondly) we express a huge range of emotion and communication through our faces. Thirdly, our society places a huge stress on the importance of vision and appearance, so even if it was only a fashiin element, some people feel very strongly about changing how they dress. Finally, due to awareness of our id and conciousness being a phenomenon in our brains, we’ve also gained an increased sense of self being in the head. (this may also be emphasized by the cluster if sensors in close proximity as well). All of these factors individually can be enough to explain Joyce’s self image concerns. Given that they come as a set, well, I respect her concerns. There can be a similar struggle happen for those of who need to start medication for mental health.
Interestingly, apparently the ancient egyptians conceived of the self being in the torso. As a result they discarded the brain during mummification and this apparently also influenced how they viewed the world.
I can understand where she’s coming from here. I had to get glasses when I was 13-ish and stuck with them for about a year before switching to contacts right before starting high school. I didn’t have an issue with the way I looked with glasses, but it didn’t really feel like me when I was wearing them, and the idea of starting a new school where I’d meet a bunch of new people who only knew the version of me with glasses didn’t sit well with me because on a certain level it just didn’t feel like that was what I looked like. I wasn’t as intense about it as Joyce is, but I also hadn’t recently had to go through a massive amount of change in a very short period of time like she has, so the prospect of change wasn’t as loaded a subject for me as it is for her.
236 thoughts on “New face”
Ana Chronistic
Joyce, that’s EXACTLY why I got glasses in the first place
Clif
You didn’t like how you looked? To change the real you?
I’ve never felt that anything about my body defined who I am, but that seems to be a minority view. Probably has something to do with hard headedness in general.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
As someone who wore glasses as a kid (along with a patch to help fix two lazy eyes – I looked like a mess), I can tell you Joyce that glasses are NOT part of your face – if you don’t like the pair you’re wearing, get new ones! (My pair looked ugly af, but for some reason 8yo me thought they looked really cool xD)
Devin
This is exactly what I was thinking. You get to change your face if you don’t like it, and you get to pick part of your face! How is that not a blessing?
Yet_One_More_Idiot
I was so lucky – I wore my glasses for a year, maybe two, and once my lazy eyes were fixed I haven’t had to wear glasses at all since (I’m now 38). My dad, on the other hand, did not wear his prescribed specs as a kid and has paid for it with a lifetime of having to wear them (also it would’ve helped if he’d agreed to have the surgery to fix his squint, apparently it has to be done when you’re young enough to adjust).
Roborat
If you were wearing two eye patches, I don’t think there was much need for the glasses.
Crimsonstorm
Funny thing is, I was the opposite. Like, I wore glasses from age 13 to 25, and I never ever liked how I looked in glasses as much as I did without. It just didn’t feel like me. And contacts were mostly out, my eyes are too sensitive and it was uncomfortable (not a mental squeamishness, but they felt physically bad for the first hour or so of the day every day.)
I ended up being very fortunate enough to afford laser vision correction, which obviously isn’t an option for everyone, but I like how I look a lot better now.
Zee
I didn’t start wearing glasses consistently til i was 18 or smth but i refuse to be seen without them now. They’re like makeup for me
Doopyboop
I’d bring up contacts, but Joyce would be way too squeamish for that.
Cholma
I sure am. The mere thought of putting something in my eye squicks me out.
DiDi
Hard same. Hard. Same.
He Who Abides
Ditto. As a result, I need prescription sunglasses for work. Bouncers wearing regular glasses get laughed at.
Zaxares
Ditto too! I have the kind of eyes that squeeze shut the moment something comes near them, so contacts are right out for me. I’ve worn glasses since I was… 7? Maybe 6? Either way, a long, long, loooong time. Were it not for baby photos, I wouldn’t even remember what I looked like without them.
Also, I’m not sure if Joyce’s resistance to getting glasses is because she feels it changes a fundamental aspect of “her look”, but if so, I wonder how she’s going to cope as she gets older and one day looks in the mirror and sees a completely different person staring back at her.
Andy
For me, it was the annoyance of having to poke myself (gently) in the eye every morning and then pull them out at night. Glasses are easy to take off and put on quickly as needed. Contacts aren’t. There’s also the fact that my prescription is light enough that it’s no big deal if I go without, so it was often easier to just skip it than see clearly.
Greg
Exactly my thought process. “What about contacts? Oh wait wait wait nevemind.”
I remember when my wife first got contacts (also in college!) it took her… an hour (or maybe more?) to put them in the first time and she wasn’t nearly as squeamish as Joyce.
(Of course now it’s basically second nature to her and can pop them in and out super quick but I still find it pretty weird.)
Anna
It’s VERY difficult in the beginning. Just physically difficult – eyeballs weren’t designed to have objects put on top of them.
Lena
I got my first contacts in 7th grade and cannot for the life of me imagine myself wearing glasses. Maybe it’s easier when you’re younger, but for me it was always just routine.
MugiwaraNoPancakes
Yeah, if Joyce can’t even handle the whooshing air thing in her eye then she’ll never manage contacts
ischemgeek
Not necessarily. I have a hard time with the air poof but can manage contacts. Trick is to warm up the lens with your palm before putting it in.
Ava-Ann
I don’t know you personally but I feel like you’re still more reasonable than Joyce.
Chronos
Yeah, I don’t think I could do that, either.
Rainhat
I’m waiting for someone to bring them up, in the comic.
Wackiness will ensue.
Miri
When I was at school one of my friends needed to leave and go to A&E because her contact tore as she was taking it out leaving half a glass lens against her eyeball ? She was fine but the idea of a jagged glass edge just balanced on an eyeball squicks me out quite a lot.
Victor
Glass?
I don’t think contacts have ever been glass.
With soft lenses (which is what pretty much everybody has) it’s very, very soft and flexible plastic. If one tears, you just reach in and grab the other half. I’ve had it happen, it’s mostly annoying because you need a new lens, which you may not have handy.
Hard lenses are more rigid plastic, not glass.
foamy
I hear you but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I put contacts in my eyes anyway.
I’ll stick with glasses. Sucks for sports, though.
Hermitess
Hard contacts definitely used to be glass.
According to Wikipedia: “Although Louis J. Girard invented a scleral contact lens in 1887,[13] it was German ophthalmologist Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick who in 1888 fabricated the first successful afocal scleral contact lens.[14] Approximately 18–21 mm (0.71–0.83 in) in diameter, the heavy blown-glass shells rested on the less sensitive rim of tissue surrounding the cornea and floated on a dextrose solution.”
A few other Google sources confirm the timeline and material as well.
LiamKav
Yeah, but unless Miri is actually 90 years old then its pretty unlikely that their friend had glass contacts.
Hermitess
My reply was more to Victor who said they didn’t think they’d ever been glass, rather than Miri. I was just pointing out that they really had been, originally. My mum has talked about glass contacts from the 60s-70s, but those may have been a hard plastic and just called glass, IDK.
Cimorene
My mom’s first contacts were glass D: they’ve always icked me out
Iguanaraptor
I’m glad I missed the glass contacts, but my first contacts were hard plastic. They took some getting used to and could be a bit painful at times. Then I fell asleep wearing them. I have never felt anything as painful as when I woke up the next day. I got the lenses out, but all I could do was walk around blind, crying hard for hours. Had to take the day off from school, but couldn’t enjoy it.
Zee
I’d say dorothy bring up contacts specifically to make Joyce more okay with glasses
Socks
So, when do we tell her about contacts?
JetstreamGW
Never, because she will literally shit herself.
BBCC
She couldn’t even handle a puff of air in her eye.
Viktoria
Contacts are way easier than the air puff.
BBCC
I don’t think Joyce will feel that way.
Tan
About 40 strips ago. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/contacts/
BlackScarabFilmZ
And if you get several pairs of glasses, you can have many faces! Just like Man-E-Faces!
Pinkie
I don’t get why people have this hangup about wearing glasses. They’d rather…not be able to see?
UnfrozenNeanderthal
Eh, if you can make do well enough without ’em…
Can think of plenty of things in my life that are broken but work well enough that I can’t be bothered to fix
Ame
Getting glasses for the first time is dope; I remember looking at trees and seeing individual leaves. Going from low-res to high-res but… like… REALITY
Masumi
SAME
anonymsly
My dad was the same after his cataracts surgery. He just walked around stunned by the detail for days at least.
foamy
I got my first set in 3rd Grade and I can still remember just boggling at the fact that street signs could in fact *be read from across the intersection* on the ride back home.
That was around twenty-five years ago. I don’t think I’ll ever forget, at this point.
ischemgeek
Same. Hard same.
Like stupidly the first sentence out of my mouth was, “It’s like a photo!”
Cuz like I had been nearsighted for so long I didn’t know that you’re supposed to be able to see that clearly.
Tim
When you’ve lived your life 40+ years with perfect vision? It’s hard to accept you may need them now.
Bicycle Bill
But Joyce is not 40+, and we don’t know how long her vision has been … let’s say, ‘sub-standard’. If she’d been in a public or parochial school instead of being home-schooled, she might have been struggling to see the blackboard for years.
And for the record, I’ve been a four-eyes guy since roughly 3rd grade, when it turned out I was having trouble seeing the blackboard clearly.
deliverything
While Tim was probably being self-referential… Compare the ratio of real life time to DoA time and extrapolate, and Joyce would have been born *does a lazy barely-trying calculation* about three and a half real life centuries ago.
Blindness
They don’t like change…as someone who has two people who hate change to the point that they complain about new neighbors and new doctors it’s tough to live with them and tough for them to accept that things aren’t always the same even after just a couple of months!
Keulen
I don’t get it either, but I’ve been wearing glasses since I was three or four. I consider my glasses part of my face, and it’s weird when I look at pictures of me when I was a baby and didn’t wear glasses.
Alanari
I was about her age when I got my glasses. Thing is, I didn’t know I can’t really see. I was VERY rectulant to wear glasses. Until I got out of the shop, looked around and thought “wow. THAT’S what the world looks like?!”
Took me a week or so to openly admit it though. Teenager and pride and stuff.
Autogatos
I think it’s def more about not liking change and having dealt with so much change lately, her familiar reflection was one thing she had control over, and now she’s lost that too.
Sam
They would rather not *change*. They would rather not recognise that something was *wrong* with them. They would rather not have to accept the relatively minor inconveniences of dealing with this new THING. Once you are used to it, it will be no big deal, but it’s like accepting new limitations on how you can move and act and that this thing will be part of your life no matter what.
It is easier to accept getting glasses as a child when you haven’t fully formed a concept of your identity and what you look like. Glasses do change how you look and how you are perceived. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is different.
The new clarity can override all the other emotional stuff because ‘WOW, I CAN SEE SO MUCH BETTER!’ but you’ve got to actually try the glasses for that.
Needfuldoer
Well, for now she could just wear them in the lecture halls so she can see the board. But then being able to see clearly is addictive, she might be afraid of getting hooked.
Proto_Eevee
The scariest part is not recognizing yourself in the mirror without them.
LiterallyJustSomeGuy
Because you’re used to what you look like with glasses, or because your vision is too blurry to see your reflection?
DrunkenNordmann
Yes.
Clif
Definitely yes.
Amy
Yes.
Needfuldoer
Yes.
UnfrozenNeanderthal
I’m eager to see what she ends up settling on.
Keulen
I just want to see Joyce trying on different pairs already. I’ve been looking forward to seeing Joyce wearing glasses since this arc began.
Needfuldoer
Probably a conservatively styled thin wire frame, similar to Dorothy’s and Jocelyne’s but maybe a bit more rectangular instead of an oval. Joyce seems like she’ll lean toward the least noticeable frame that fits her.
Suet
*subtly plays New Face by PSY down the hall*
Horrifying is when the light shines on your glasses, or below the chin
Suet
Speaking of glasses, *glances at Joyce’s face* I’d prefer her in an aviator style,
Large yet chic to fit her expressive face
Cholma
Weird. I’ve worn glasses since High School, and never once thought of them this way. How are glasses any different from the clothing you decide to wear each day, or how you style your hair? Your face is your face, Joyce, unless you get horribly disfigured in an accident.
Jane
They’re phrasing it in a rather strong way, but I agree with the basic sentiment; after wearing glasses for so long, seeing myself in the mirror or a photograph without them just looks weird. Like it’s someone else.
I mean, if you see someone in uniform for decades, or they cut their hair short after having it long for ages, doesn’t that look weird for a while until you adjust to the new image? It’s the same sentiment, really; it just tends to be more pronounced with glasses for various reasons.
Regalli
Yeah, I’ve had them since I was five or six and genuinely struggle to recognize my face without them sometimes.
StClair
The last time I got my driver’s license renewed, they had me take them off. I found out that without them, and at the right angle and lighting (not what I usually see in the mirror), I look a lot more like one of my brothers than I previously thought.
Demoted Oblivious
It’s a good day to wax on from my arm-chair… gather round and chew the salt.
It seems like a common conceit to identify the image of the self most strongly with the perception of ones own face. (at least in modern times) Firstly there’s Pareidolia, which is heavily selected by evolution for face recognition. So we’re hard-wired to see faces everywhere and perceive it as important. This is of course because (secondly) we express a huge range of emotion and communication through our faces. Thirdly, our society places a huge stress on the importance of vision and appearance, so even if it was only a fashiin element, some people feel very strongly about changing how they dress. Finally, due to awareness of our id and conciousness being a phenomenon in our brains, we’ve also gained an increased sense of self being in the head. (this may also be emphasized by the cluster if sensors in close proximity as well). All of these factors individually can be enough to explain Joyce’s self image concerns. Given that they come as a set, well, I respect her concerns. There can be a similar struggle happen for those of who need to start medication for mental health.
Interestingly, apparently the ancient egyptians conceived of the self being in the torso. As a result they discarded the brain during mummification and this apparently also influenced how they viewed the world.
catcet
I can understand where she’s coming from here. I had to get glasses when I was 13-ish and stuck with them for about a year before switching to contacts right before starting high school. I didn’t have an issue with the way I looked with glasses, but it didn’t really feel like me when I was wearing them, and the idea of starting a new school where I’d meet a bunch of new people who only knew the version of me with glasses didn’t sit well with me because on a certain level it just didn’t feel like that was what I looked like. I wasn’t as intense about it as Joyce is, but I also hadn’t recently had to go through a massive amount of change in a very short period of time like she has, so the prospect of change wasn’t as loaded a subject for me as it is for her.
HeinousActsZX