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In the sweltering heat of an early July weekend in Madrid, singer-songwriter Lorde paused during her set to swig from her signature rainbow-hued water bottle. As she thanked the crowd for being there and being part of “something real,” she took a swing at something that’s increasingly becoming an object of ire and suspicion.
“You don’t know if someone’s wearing sunglasses, or if they’re wearing those fucked-up fucking… Can I just say, for the record, fuck the glasses! Don’t get the glasses – not sexy,” she said.
It’s not a fringe viewpoint – if anything, it’s the tip of the iceberg. Already widely decried online as “pervert glasses,” smart glasses made by companies such as Meta are catching heat, particularly from a demographic they’re increasingly trying to court: women. Lorde railing so publicly against smart glasses hints at the trouble that’s still to come for Meta and others trying to sell what are widely perceived to be surveillance tools to a group who are already deeply wary of the technology.
It became clear just how much of a priority women are to the success of smart glasses last month when Meta launched its most recent designs in collaboration with pop-culture powerhouse Kylie Jenner – not only making use of her in its extensive ad campaign, but adopting her voice for Meta AI.
While Jenner isn’t the first female ambassador Meta has leaned on – Blackpink’s Jennie, who took the stage at Mad Cool immediately after Lorde, is one of the faces of the Meta Ray-Bans – it felt like an abrupt switch-up in the messaging around who smart glasses are aimed at.
As the still-emerging tech, which saw 167% year-on-year growth between 2025 and 2026 according to IDC, has started to take hold, the primary audience for these new face-worn computers largely appears to be men. Tech companies, including Meta – the current market leader by some distance – have primarily marketed the glasses to men, and men seem to have most readily adopted them.
Women and smart glasses
I’m a female tech reporter who spends significant amounts of time moving in circles with tech reporters, influencers, executives and early adopters. For the past three years, I’ve seen Meta’s Ray-Bans and Oakley glasses everywhere on the tech events circuit, but I can only think of one woman I know who uses them regularly.
This is anecdotal evidence, but it does hint at the possibility that there haven’t been many women in the loop when it comes to conceiving, designing, marketing and finding compelling uses for smart glasses.
Young women helped make Jenner a billionaire by buying her makeup, and they wield outsize cultural power as trendsetters. Now, as tech companies try to cash in on that influence and spending power, they’re encountering not just reluctance but outright hostility.
Women have seen the credible reporting about women being harassed by men wearing smart glasses, or secretly being filmed or photographed. Many content creators and activists – mainly, but not exclusively, women and queer men – have railed against the glasses for some time, but now that marketing is actively targeting them, the real backlash is kicking in.
“You can’t have a hit product without women, and Meta needs these glasses to be a hit because it will show shareholders that the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve invested into AI is paying off,” said content creator Matt Bernstein on Instagram. “So who better to manufacture consent for predator goggles than the single-most famous woman on the internet?”
It’s a win-win for Meta and Jenner, added Bernstein, saying the only people who lose are the women and girls who are even less safe in public than they were before.
When approached for comment, a spokesperson for Meta pointed us toward the company’s latest Q&A on privacy and glasses and provided the following statement:
“More and more people use our AI glasses because they’re genuinely helpful in everyday moments like listening to music, getting live translation while traveling, or making a call hands-free. The people who use them and those around them need to trust them. That’s why we built privacy into our AI glasses from the ground up.
“For example, every pair has a capture LED that blinks when you take a photo or video that you can save or share, it can’t be turned off, and if someone covers or damages the LED, the camera is disabled. We will keep strengthening our protections as our glasses become even more capable.”
A representative for Jenner didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Kardashian effect
Of all the women in the world, Jenner is a perfect pick for Meta to use as a vessel for selling smart glasses. She is perhaps the most of-the-moment member of the Kardashian family – reality TV and social media royalty – and the one who resonates most with Gen Z.
“The Kardashians are a cheat code to virality,” says MJ Corey, a cultural critic and author of the book Dekonstructing the Kardashians, quoting a fellow Kardashian scholar Natalie Franklin. The Kardashians have also long been early adopters of new technology and media, she added, pointing at the way Kim Kardashian mainstreamed the Instagram selfie at a time when people were only posting pictures of sunsets and their breakfasts.
Meta’s partnership with Kylie is a smart marketing move, says Corey, who goes by @Kardashian_Kolloquium on Instagram and TikTok.
“It indicates just how powerful the Kardashians are to kick off conversations and really draw attention to a product through people’s ambivalence. I always say people hate the Kardashians because they do represent the internet, and we naturally, understandably, actually have a lot of anxiety about the internet and its potential to scale.”
Smart glasses will be “terrible for women” in many of the same ways Instagram hasn’t been positive for women, she adds. “The Kardashians bring what some people perceive to be sort of a toxic femininity to their relationships with technology, and it does help the technology to expand.”
Ahead of the Kylie Meta Glasses launch, and before she knew what the product was, Corey was approached to promote the glasses for free. She thinks the marketing team was hoping she would make content deciphering the billboards teasing the launch of the device.
“It insulted me,” she says. As someone who has studied media under late capitalism intensely, she feels quite sure smart glasses won’t lead us anywhere good.
“The reward is not going to be worth the risk, because these mediums are designed to tap into some of our worst impulses,” says Corey. “I think we are going to become more paranoid and more performative, and women will be the first in line to take that fall.”
The birth of an anti-glasses movement
Corey is far from the only woman who Meta has tried to enlist to sell the glasses – and for many of them, it’s not going well.
The Kardashians have long been impervious to critiques of their choices, and blowback will likely be water off a duck’s back to Jenner. But already a rift is forming online between the nonbillionaire women who are (sometimes) being paid by Meta to promote the glasses, and those who object to them.
This is not a straightforward case of influencers and celebrities selling out – in many ways, the internet has made its peace with this as a concept. Instead, it’s being interpreted as an outright betrayal of the women who have and will be surveilled, stalked, exposed and otherwise harmed by men wearing smart glasses. Female influencers who are posting under #MetaRaybanpartners are being inundated with comments from their female fans expressing their disappointment.
The first threat to Meta and others is that women simply won’t want to buy the glasses at all. Unlike AI, which women are also using less than men, there’s actual consumer choice and spending involved. Most of us are used to having AI foisted upon us by Google, Meta, Microsoft and others through “helpful” software features, but that passive acceptance of the technology can’t be duplicated when purchasing hardware is involved.
The second threat will likely come as part of a bigger campaign. What’s already bubbling up online will spill over into real life. People will publicly call out and shame those who choose to wear them – the “pervert glasses” moniker will become embedded – and nonpublic spaces may start to ban them.
Activist Gina Martin, who successfully led a campaign in the UK to get upskirting classified as a criminal offense, says that she can already see a movement growing in opposition to the glasses, sparked by wider frustration of Big Tech’s overreach into our lives.
“Everyday people are becoming more and more angry at tech billionaires for their overreaching influence in Western politics and their rapid expansion of data centers ravaging community water systems,” she says. The Meta glasses, Martin adds, are a representation of the tech oligarchy’s intrusion into our everyday lives.
“I think community pushback from marginalized people and women will increase as Meta brings out next-gen models of Meta glasses,” says Martin, citing particular concerns about rumored always-on recording. “We’re going to see public altercations, boycotts and more.”
Smart glasses are already a hard sell for the companies investing in this technology, but they shouldn’t underestimate how much harder it’s about to get. Lorde’s war cry is just the beginning.
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