Once upon a time there was a little girl. She was four years old and needed to get glasses.

She went with her parents to the best optician in her town so she could choose a nice frame. She was thrilled.

She fully understood that the glasses she would wear from then on would help her to see well, to see sharply everything there was to observe and learn about. How much there was to discover! Too many.

There was to run, there was to ride a bicycle,

there was to play with the cat, there was to explore the countryside and then also to climb trees.

In short, there was to stay a child!

She was a very vital child and very independent. She was a child of the 2000s.

The choice of her first eyeglass frame that afternoon at the optician’s was definitely an arduous one.

You would think there were too many opportunities and thus an embarrassment of choice? Exactly the opposite.

She was shown a few models, mostly not too pretty nor comfortable. Glasses with decorations and references to characters with bows on their curly blond hair, or simple scaled-down reproductions of adult frames in children’s versions.

Are we talking about comfort?  No. Not even thinking about it. Uncomfortable fits, nothing really ergonomic.

Materials? Plastic, rubber and nothing more. No alternative.

The somewhat disappointed child quickly lost interest. The ‘eyeglass she liked best was blue in color but it didn’t really fit her nose! The one that fit her least was a pale pink. Definitely, pink, was not really her favorite color.

Good. So?  You would say.

She walked out of the optician’s with that pair of pink glasses but was not at all happy about it.

A moment of enthusiasm, of active involvement in choosing that object, which had the superpower of making her see better; simply turned into a ‘forgettable experience.

Were those glasses really meant for children?

It is precisely that same question that the parents asked themselves along with the optician.

And that is precisely why the wooden glasses were born.

That child’s father was a sculptor and had been wearing glasses since school age.

He remembered very well how uncomfortable his frames had been in the 1960s….

Good. Perhaps he could have alleviated some of those discomforts for his little daughter?

Maybe.

The optician friend one evening asked the little girl’s father provocatively:

” But why don’t you who are an artist, a designer design a pair of glasses for your daughter? Have you ever thought of that? ”

The father replied, ” Well, I have worked with a lot of materials but never materials like acetate!”

“I guess,” replied the Optician.

“I was referring for example to wood since your sculptural works are so skillfully worked, they are beautiful! ”

That evening, a “Creative Woodworm” crept into the thoughts of the little girl’s rose-eyed father. That Tapeworm has never left and still feeds from that gray matter.

[All references to people and things are not purely coincidental.]

wooclass.com

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