Kamina Glasses

About

Kamina Glasses (sometimes referred to as Kamina shades or Gar glasses) are a pair of orange, triangle shaped glasses used as a photoshop item added to a person or object, based on the pair worn by Gurren Lagann character Kamina. The idea of the meme is to take something plain looking and instantly make it look cool by adding the glasses. Although this is mainly done through Photoshop, they can also be used in a drawing or even as a real prop.

Origin

The glasses are named after the character Kamina from the anime Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Kamina is known for his manliness and wearing his signature sunglasses (often used as as an example of GAR). Although Kamina is not the first person in anime history to wear this type of glasses, the glasses style themselves do not have an official name; thus the glasses have become synonymous with him, even going as far as to mount a giant pair of them on his personal Gunmen mecha Gurren), and is now known as a symbol of epicness.

Spread

On October 8th, 2007, LiveJournal user nubs^[1] created the Tengen Toppa Gurren Glasses page which hosted user submitted images of various characters that have been edited with the Kamina Glasses on^[2]. Various discussions and photoshop threads regarding the glasses can be found in sites such as Naruto Forums^[3], Rune Tips^[4], Youchew^[5], AnimeSuki^[6], 4chan^[7], and Tumblr^[8]. On Deviantart, typing the keyword “Kamina Glasses” would yield more than 1.330 results with the earliest fan work dating back to mid 2007^[9].
On August 26th, 2010, TVtropes submitted an entry regarding Triangle Shades which uses Kamina’s Glasses as one of its prime examples^[10].