Kamina Glasses

About

Kamina Glasses, also known as Kamina Shades or Gar Glasses, are a pair of red-tinted, triangle-shaped sunglasses (often depicted as orange) worn by the character Kamina from the anime series Gurren Lagann. In 2007, web users began using the glasses as an exploitable, photoshopping them onto various characters in order to make them look "cool," sharing some similarities to the Deal With It meme. The trend peaked around 2009 and is still used over a decade later on occasion.

Origin

In the anime series Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the character Kamina, known for his manliness, wears a pair of red-tinted triangular glasses, which naturally became known as "Kamina glasses," although he is not the first character to use the style of shades (character shown below).

It's unknown when exactly web users began photoshopping Kamina's glasses onto other characters for comedic effect. The practice likely began in an anime forum about the show sometime in 2007. On August 23rd, 2007, Deviant Art^[5] user T4R0K uploaded a piece of fan art showing the character Saber from the visual novel Fate/stay night with Kamina glasses, garnering over 1,000 views in 14 years (shown below).

Spread

On October 8th, 2007, LiveJournal^[1][2] user nubs started the Tengen Toppa Gurren Glasses page, which hosted user-submitted images of various characters that have been edited with the Kamina Glasses on. On October 14th, user Coaxmetal started a thread of Kamina Glasses photoshops on the Naruto Forums.^[3]

On August 26th, 2010, TVtropes^[4] submitted an entry regarding triangle shades, using Kamina's glasses as one of the prime examples. On December 1st, 2012, KH13^[6] user dusk started a forum thread for sharing Kamina Glasses photoshops, resulting in numerous edits (examples shown below).

On May 22nd, 2017, YouTuber^[8] BestGuyEver uploaded a video in which he argues that Kamina's glasses are red and not orange as many people draw them, offering a number of screenshots as proof of this. The video gained over 80,000 views in four years (shown below).

Based on a Google Trends search for "Kamina Glasses," the trend has been in decline since around 2009 but has remained in use over a decade later. For example, on January 2nd, 2021, Redditor u/smolbeanfriend posted a piece of art to /r/offlineTV^[7] adding Kamina glasses to Twitch streamer Scarra's Vtube persona, garnering over 1,900 upvotes in three months (shown below).

Template

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References