After years of wearing fun, funky frames while hosting The View, Whoopi Goldberg did her first show this week free of glasses. The 67-year-old revealed that after undergoing a procedure to deal with the condition presbyopia, an age-related decline in the ability of the eyes to focus on nearby objects, she can see clearly now.
“I had an operation and they replaced the lens and the lens they replace it with is kind of like my eyeglass lens,” she shared with her co-hosts and viewers. According to the Oscar winner, her vision is already significantly better a few weeks after having the surgery on one of her eyes. Just two weeks ago, she couldn’t read the prompter on the show without her glasses; now she can.
“This is something they’ve been doing for a while and people don’t know about it,” she said. “Your insurance will cover it, though you have to pay for the lens yourself.”
“If you have any issue with your eyes, I don’t know if it works for everybody but I’m telling you I’m sitting here able to read this,” she said while reading info about her condition off of a brochure. “If you’re having any issues with your eyes, please go get them checked. The bionic times have arrived.”
For Goldberg, it’s been nice to go back to being free of her frames, though they’ve become almost as big of an identifier as her locs. She joked about the fact that people over a certain age likely remember a time without her trendy frames.
“I’ve been wearing glasses now for almost 28 years. If you’re over 28, you know what I looked like before, when I was wearing sunglasses or cool glasses because they were cool,” she said. “If you’re under 28, you don’t know that there was a time that I didn’t have glasses, and now, this is what I look like! You know, it’s not so bad.”
Round eyeglasses have become synonymous with Goldberg’s style for quite some time. Now fans of the iconic actress and TV personality will have to get used to seeing her lovely face sans the spectacles. C’mon cheekbones!
Check out everything she had to say about how her vision has changed since deciding to deal with her presbyopia.