CD Flipping / CD Glasses

Submission 19,867

About

CD Flipping, also known as CD Glasses, is a photo fad which involves placing a pair of digital optical discs, usually CDs or DVDs, between the ears and the arms of one's eyeglasses and thrusting the head back to sling the discs towards to cover their eyes.

Origin

The first known online instance of CD flipping can be traced back to an animated GIF uploaded by Imgur user ArunisCharo in a post titled "You Won't Believe This One Simple Trick – Opticians Hate Him!"^[2] on November 1st, 2015 (shown below). That same day, the GIF was submitted to Reddit's /r/funny^[1], where it garnered more than 4,500 points and 200 comments prior to its archival.

Spread

In the following months, a number of similar animated GIFs and videos of people sporting their "CD glasses" emerged on Tumblr^[9], Twitter^[10], Imgur^[12], YouTube^[13] and Vine.^[14] On January 5th, 2015, BuzzFeed posted a video titled "WTF: CD Glasses Flicking Is The First Weird Trend of 2016"^[4] on its Facebook page, accumulating more than 2.4 million views, 25,000 likes and 14,000 shares in just over ten days. That same day, Mashable^[5] ran an article titled "People are putting CDs in their glasses because that's a thing now," followed by The Huffington Post's video report^[8] on the next day. On January 7th, BuzzFeed ran another article^[11] with a GIF compilation of celebrities trying the viral fad at the CBS People's Choice Awards (shown below, left). The next day, a compilation video of the emerging fad was uploaded to YouTube (shown below, right).