Around the year 1752, eyeglass designer James Ayscough introduced his spectacles with double-hinged side pieces. The lenses were made of tinted glass as well as clear. Ayscough felt that white glass created an offensive glaring light, that was bad to the eyes. He advised the use of green and blue glasses. Ayscough glasses were the first sunglass like eyeglasses, but they were not made to shield the eyes from the sun, they corrected for vision problems.

In 1929, Sam Foster sold the first pair of Foster Grants (sunglasses) at the Woolworth on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Foster started the Foster Grant Company in 1919.

Sunglasses became popular in the 1930s.

Edwin H. Land invented a cellophane-like polarizing filter (patented in 1929), the first modern filters to polarize light. Polarizing celluloid became the critical element in polarizing sunglass lenses, it is a process that reduces light glare. In 1932, Land along with Harvard physics instructor, George Wheelwright III, founded the Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in Boston, where Land developed and began (in 1936) to use numerous types of Polaroid material in sunglasses and other optical devices. In 1937, Land founded the Polaroid Corporation and began to use his filters in Polaroid sunglasses, glare-free automobile headlights and stereoscopic (3-D) photography. Land is best known for his invention and marketing of instant photography.