Why Have Sunglasses Gotten So Tiny, and Why Do So Many People Hate Them?

Investigating a very serious issue.

A few weeks ago, Mindy Kaling tweeted, "I think we will regret this tiny sunglasses look." She was reacting to something we've all watched with wonder over the past year: the curious case of the shrinking shades.

First there was Kanye West famously dictating to wife Kim Kardashian over e-mail that she no longer wear big sunglasses if she wants to be cool. Then Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner jumped on the trend, as did major fashion designers like Alexander Wang and Adam Selman. Kristen Stewart recently also wore teensy gold frames at Cannes.

But while the red carpet and pap snaps show us one thing, Twitter shows us another: a bunch of confused people (and celebs) who are 100 percent not on the same page. "I remember this moment in the mid 90's #regret," Reese Witherspoon responded to Kaling. Busy Phillips admitted to buying a pair but never wearing them. Padma Lakshmi simply sent two cry-laughing emojis. Kaling's tweet went viral, showing up on various Instagram meme pages and garnering more than 105,000 likes and 17,000 retweets to date.

Trend-setting is cyclical, according to Dr. Vanessa Brown, professor at the School of Art and Design at Nottingham-Trent University and author of Cool Shades: The History and Meaning of Sunglasses.

"One thing you can guarantee with fashion is that when things have reached an extreme aesthetically, they'll swing the opposite direction," she says. So as soon as glasses grew so big and bug-eyed that they were covering your whole face, around the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017, that's when small shades started popping up on celebrity faces and infiltrating your Instagram feed. Stella McCartney, Adam Selman, and Roberi & Fraud were among the first brands to lead the charge last year.

Plus, when the masses start wearing a fad, it suddenly becomes uncool to the It crowd, so designers and style stars start asking themselves, "What's the bravest and seemingly weirdest thing to do?" Behold: baby shades.

"Small frames are new and exciting," says Hamish Tame, creative director for Australian sunglasses brand Le Specs, which carries many a tiny frame. "We've lived through so many years of the heavy, oversize trends that now it feels fresh and liberating to wear a pair of small sunglasses."

Tiny shades aren't going anywhere anytime soon. You're still going to see the Bella Hadids of the world wearing them out and about in NYC or in selfies on Instagram.

"We still have a lot to explore with the narrow styles, where we can start to experiment with shapes and materials," Tame says, referring to geometric looks like hexagons and interesting iterations of metallics and plastics. "I would give the micro moment at least another few years."

For you doubters out there, Tame does offer a glimmer of hope about the Great Shrink: "Any smaller, and we'd be wearing paper clips."