Shade-Tippin’: A Retrospective

You know what’s cool? Wearing shades! You know what’s even cooler than wearing shades? Looking OVER your shades at someone. This, dear readers, is the familiar phenomenon known as shade-tippin’.

First pioneered by Dolores Haze on the poster of Stanley Kubrick’s notorious film Lolita in 1962, shade-tippin’ has come to be one of the sexiest, most seductive, most demonstrative revelation of “cool” that any character on a movie poster could possibly express. I wear shades, they declare to the world, but I just saw something that I don’t want impeded. It’s very impressive. Most likely, it’s you, girl. You’re the sexy thing I need to get a better look at.

The eyes, as the aphorism goes, are the windows to the soul. Shades allow us to be alert, to have our souls awake and intact, but to guard them from the world. Shades keep our souls mysterious to a casual onlooker, and we demand to be sought behind our shades. I wear my sunglasses at night so I can, so I can watch you weave then breathe your storylines. We are voyeurs with our sunglasses, waiting to be made into participants, daring others to invite us cautiously into their drama. When we tip our shades, we don’t just take a glimpse, we reveal ourselves. It is the ultimate form of human connection.

Below is a gallery of ten prime examples of this philosophical expression. Look over your shades, cool ones, and behold the soul-revealing glory of shade-tippin’ (just in time for National Sunglasses Day).


Witney Seibold is the head film critic for Nerdist, and a contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly Trolling articles here on Crave, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind. 

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