Hats are back: 150 years of artificial light taking a toll on our eyes

Hats are back because of the eye toll of artificial light

Some people simply cannot walk into a supermarket at midday. Photophobia — an abnormal intolerance to light that turns a fluorescent tube into a hammer — forces them to reschedule their shopping to 7:30 or 8:30 pm, when store lighting is supposedly gentler. It isn't. The scene, described in first person by someone who has fashioned a turban out of a towel and cardboard to replace a lost cap, sums up a problem that goes far beyond an individual nuisance: excess ambient brightness and the poor quality of the lenses and bulbs around us.

From the light bulb to giant hats

The spread of the electric light bulb between 1870 and 1900 didn't just change cities: it changed heads. The thesis put forward in the conversation is that hats grew in size and opacity because the human eye was not biologically prepared for that constant bath of light. Some even point to a rise in blindness and epileptic seizures in that period. The timeline is nothing new: in the 17th century hats had already reached remarkable dimensions, coinciding with seafaring and prolonged exposure to the outdoors, and the eye patches of the early modern era would respond more to photophobia than to the pirate battles popularized by fiction.

There is an uncomfortable point to this reasoning: if the hat was for centuries a tool of eye protection and not an ornament, its abandonment in the 20th century was not a fashion advance but a loss of armor. And now, with store lighting at maximum levels and screen consumption soaring, we need it again.

What hat to buy when the store is the problem

The practical consensus is that the wide-brimmed hat is the answer. The underlying complaint is about quality: what you find at mainstream chains is, in the words of the shopper, "low-quality junk in general." The alternative gaining ground in the conversation is the wide-brimmed gentleman's hat, the medieval leather model, or the good old beret, which does the job without fuss.

On buying online, the advice going around is to spend a bit more than it hurts and, when in doubt about size, go big: shrinking a size is easy with sizing tape, enlarging it is an ordeal. Leather newsboy styles suit slim builds; fedoras and trilbies, on the other hand, have lost steam as a fashion option, though a good specimen still works.

Great hair as an obstacle and the beret as a flag

There is a collateral problem nobody mentions, and it shows up the moment you try on a baseball cap: hair. Wearing one indoors leaves your hair with pillow head and forces you to carry a pocket comb. For those with a full head of hair, the hat is not just protection: it is an aesthetic burden. For those without, the equation simplifies.

The identity note comes from the beret or txapela (the traditional Basque beret), championed as a native alternative to foreign fashions. The irony writes itself: the hat that protected from the sun and artificial light also becomes a badge of identity. Meanwhile, photophobia is still there, waiting for someone to leave the house with an uncovered head.

The unsettling detail: the only cap available was lost, and the temporary substitute was a towel turban with a cardboard frame. Buying the wide-brimmed hat is no longer a matter of style.