When you think of John Lennon from The Beatles, you’re likely to picture him with his circular, wire-rimmed glasses.
But at times, he wore contact lenses, or at least he tried to. They kept pinging out of his eyes.
Why and what Lennon did to help his contacts stick is part history and part vision science.
As I propose in my paper, it also involved smoking a lot of pot.
Lennon didn’t like wearing glasses
Before 1967, Lennon was rarely seen in public wearing glasses. His reluctance to wear them started in childhood, when he was found to be shortsighted at about the age of seven.
Nigel Walley was Lennon’s childhood friend and manager of The Quarrymen, the forerunner to The Beatles. Walley told the BBC:
Even during extensive touring during Beatlemania (1963–66), Lennon never wore glasses during live performances, unlike his hero Buddy Holly.
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