Shades of Status : Sunglasses That Make a Fashion Statement Can Wreak Havoc on One’s Financial Statement

“NICE SUNGLASSES,” sneers my ex-husband Richard. “All you need is a cupful of pencils.” This is what you get for buying $3 shades on the Venice boardwalk, chides an inner voice. “Get a decent pair,” orders Richard, who is wearing $100 Serengeti (“like the African plain”) Drivers. “You look ridiculous.”

I generally hate to admit that my ex-husband is right. Besides, I’m not one of these people who thinks that sunglasses are a fashion statement. I don’t like glasses. The happiest day of my life was the day I got contact lenses. Of course, I only wear sunglasses for utilitarian reasons: My contacts get scratchy when I’m in the sun. But everyone else seems to have gone sunglass crazy.

“I love my Ray-Bans,” exclaims the woman sitting next to me at the beauty salon. What’s to love? I wonder. Ms. Blond Highlights caresses her Dark Metal III’s. “They’re my alter ego,” she reveals. “I put them on and I’m tough.”

Some people think a pair of dark glasses can define you, like your blood type. I don’t understand it, though in a way I’m not surprised. First it was real estate. Then real estate got too expensive. Next it was cars. Then cars got too expensive. So now it’s sunglasses.

“I’ve got two pairs,” my hairdresser Carole says fondly, as if she’s talking about her children. “One’s collegiate, my Anne Klein’s. And then I’ve got my ‘killer’ sunglasses, my L.A. Eyeworks. The ones I spent $200 on.”

For $200 I could fly to Hawaii. But Carole maintains that her sunglasses also provide an escape from reality. “They have aluminum frames and mirrored lenses,” she explains. “I wear them when I want to create an attitude without having to get into it. My sunglasses make me unapproachable. People leave me alone.”

Sure they leave her alone. There’s nothing more annoying than trying to have a conversation with a person hiding behind mirrored sunglasses (which they rarely if ever remove). Not only can’t you make eye contact, which means flirting is out of the question, but you keep noticing that your hair looks funny and your makeup is smudged. “Cheap sunglasses won’t protect your eyes from the damaging invisible rays,” Carole warns me.

Mr. Cheap on the Venice boardwalk has this angle covered. He’s put enormous Ultra-Violet Protected stickers on his entire line of Nok-Offs. “Those lenses are terrible,” argues Judit Putter, the owner of Snooty Fox Eyewear. What else would she say when she’s selling $900 Cartier sunglasses made of 22-karat gold?

“The first thing people notice about you is your face,” says Putter, a licensed optician in Santa Monica who has just fit a 1-year-old client with $290 Mikli’s. “You can wear the greatest clothes in the world, but you’ll make a rotten impression if your glasses are wrong.” I begin to panic.

Even my own sister is sunglass obsessed. “I wouldn’t wear cheap sunglasses,” says Laurie, who regards her $100 Vuarnet’s as an alternative form of jewelry. “They always hurt your nose more, or they’re not as well made. And you can never lose them.” This is true. You can throw a pair of cheap sunglasses out of the car window in Tijuana and they’ll walk home to L.A.--like Lassie. Cheap sunglasses will even dig themselves out from under the sofa cushions.

But expensive sunglasses disappear before your check clears. “I had these great white Emmanuelle Khanh’s with brownish tinted lenses,” my friend Lynne recalls, hastily explaining that this was back when Khanh’s were in. “I adored them,” she says. “Then I went horseback riding and the instructor decided to teach us to trot. My glasses went flying off my face and bounced down a canyon. I seriously gave thought to going after them. I lost my company I.D. card, too, but I didn’t care at all about that.”

Lynne is a self-described sunglasses addict. “I believe in total coordination,” she says, adding that she once bought a pair of hand-painted frames to match her car. “I’ve got at least 20 pairs.” She used to have 21 pairs, but recently she was robbed. “They stole my Mikli’s,” Lynne complains. “They passed over all the others and went for my gray granite Mikli’s.”

“You’ve got to keep them on a leash,” says Putter, the optician. “I’ve heard every horror story in the world. Customers set their Porsche Carrera’s on the table and the busboy steals them. I’ve known people who had their car windows smashed to get a pair of Persol’s left on the dashboard. Everyone wants hot sunglasses.”

Not everyone, I think smugly. But a few weeks later, the temple of my inferior shades breaks. I’m in Mexico, on a glass-bottom boat surrounded by 10 sunburned noses supporting $2,000 worth of designer frames. To make matters worse, the ocean is murky, so there’s nothing for anyone to stare at but the paper clip that is now holding together my glasses.

I can’t stand the shame. As soon as I get back to Los Angeles, I hurry to the nearest eye-fashion salon. After trying on everything from buffalo horn to sterling silver, I sheepishly choose a pair of faux tortoise frames, which, the salesperson assures me, I can wear with “almost anything.” I can’t tell you how much they cost. I can’t even tell my husband.

Still, he notices.

“Nice sunglasses,” Duke says when I return home. “Do we need a rider for our insurance policy?”