Glasses can often add a dash of style, or just something special, to a person's face—this is no less true in the world of manga and anime. There are plenty of characters who prove that glasses are the epitome of chic, including characters who wear specs without needing them.
Even when there are characters who like to ditch their glasses for whatever reason—whether for a makeover or to hide their identity—fans may prefer the characters with glasses, or at least, prefer to think of them with their spectacles on. Here are some of the cutest girls in anime who don the extensive frames.
10 Tetsuko (Magical Witch Punie-Chan)
This anime, which had become famous on The Soup in the United States thanks to a scene involving a potato committing suicide, is a parody of the magical girl genre. Featuring a magical girl who is more horrifying than the villains wish they could be.
Tetsuko is the heroine's best friend on earth and the general "straight woman" to her shenanigans, like setting the world on fire and watching it burn. She also wears glasses, which likely highlights her as an intelligent, if not the only sane, character in the series.
9 Ami Mizuno (Sailor Moon)
Throughout the franchise, Ami Mizuno can sometimes be seen donning a pair of reading glasses. In the manga and '90s anime, they tend to get shiny when she becomes determined about a goal, which is usually a visual cue not to get in her way. Still, they are clearly meant to be flattering since they are drawn more realistically than Umino's glasses.
She probably doesn't need them in the '90s anime since she is only seen wearing them on occasion, and she's not the type of person to forget them, considering how often she can be seen reading a book. In the live-action show, she wears her glasses more often, but they are explicitly for appearances. And while not exactly glasses, she also notably gets a retractable blue visor when transformed into Sailor Mercury.
8 Fuu (Magic Knight Rayearth)
Fuu is a polite bookworm who attended a school for gifted girls before being transported to another realm and becoming a magical knight. She has power over wind and air, which is treated as intelligence and communication, reflecting her personality.
While generally seen as intelligent, she can say things that make her come off as being in her own little world and is a little too obsessed with fantasy games, which can be both a boon and a hindrance given her current situation. Generally, the only time Fuu doesn't wear her glasses is in full armor, although this seems to suggest there's some magic helping her rather than her not actually needing them.
7 Suha Woo (Flowering Heart)
In this South Korean-Japanese magical girl series, Suha is rarely seen without her glasses, which seem to paint her as both the most ladylike of her friends, as well as "smart" one. However, as with Ami, her glasses sometimes get shiny as a gag, like when she's being annoyed.
Unlike a lot of "henshin heroines," she usually keeps her glasses after a transformation. In fact, one of the few times she ditched her glasses was when she went to the dark side.
6 Anthy Himemiya (Revolutionary Girl Utena)
Anthy Himemiya's glasses help paint her as the shy and timid Rose Bride with little agency of her own. And not just for the audience. It's eventually revealed that she sees better without her glasses, suggesting that she intentionally wears them or is made to wear them to keep up appearances, especially when her backstory as a witch and her brother's actions are brought to light.
At the end of the series, she eventually ditches them in one of the last scenes, when she goes off on her own, suggesting they also symbolically function as a mask for her.
5 Maiko Ogure (Kill La Kill)
Some people like to take advantage of the fact the glasses make them come off as sweet and shy. Maiko is a No-Star student, comes from abject poverty, seems to be supernaturally accident-prone, and tries to come off as nice and modest. She evens a fake cast on her arm to pretend to be injured.
Her glasses hide her real personality: wanting to steal Senketsu from Ryuko, a plan which ends up backfiring horribly on her. At least her glasses don't hide her sinister, red eyes.
4 Mirai Kuriyama (Beyond The Boundary)
Mirai's glasses and baggy clothes, coupled with her petite size, help to cover up her stronger nature: coming from a line of Spirit World Warriors, she has the power to turn her blood into weapons. On the other hand, in her favor, the hero, Akihito Kanbara, loves girls with glasses almost as much as most anime viewers.
Her glasses have also brought about an interesting tic: she'll start cleaning them if she's telling a lie, to the point where she'll perform the cleaning motions even if she's not wearing them. And she's also a character who means serious business when she takes off her glasses.
3 Yomiko Readman (Read Or Die)
Also known as "The Paper," Yomiko Readman is a half-Japanese and a half-British bibliophile with the power to control paper. Her love of books is so powerful that she literally forgets to eat and drink when she's too preoccupied with a good book, so she fits the stereotype of bookish people wearing glasses to a ridiculous degree.
She's even been known to get violent when people touch her glasses. She goes to sleep wearing them and has a habit of touching them while lost in thought. That said, her main reason for wearing them isn't about being able to see or even read, but because of the man they belonged to, the man she loved, Donny Nakajima. After his death, her wearing them allows her to "read" books for him.
2 Yuki Nagato (The Melanchony Of Haruhi Suzumiya)
Until they were destroyed in a fight and forgot to recreate them, Yuki once wore glasses. Kyon comments that he thinks she looks better without them, but fans often disagree. Interestingly, the series also seems aware of just how appealing a pair of glasses can be: Haruhi once makes Mikuru wear Yuki's glasses to see how she looks with them for a photoshoot.
Whether she needed them or not depends on the continuity. In the original series, they seemed to be purely aesthetic since she was fine without them. However, the spin-off, The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, implies she needs them because she can't see properly without wearing glasses.
1 Retasu Midorikawa (Tokyo Mew Mew)
Retasu Midorikawa, the third Mew Mew, is a shy, sweet girl whose glasses are believed to help emphasize her demure nature to the audience. However, in the anime, it's made clear that she actually does need them and has problems seeing without them.
Interestingly, she loses her glasses when she transforms into her superpowered alter-ego, Mew Lettuce, for unexplained reasons. Of course, she is bonded with a porpoise, and animals aren't exactly known for wearing glasses.