Standard for judging competitions?

[lucia_l]

It just gets a little difficult in competition when all the guys are in black to pick out the right guy if he gets too far away from me!

Mostly, I don't worry about finding him. I only take them off when queueing up to dance a heat. I just make sure I'm right there on the carpet between the velvet ropes when waiting to dance. He can find me waiting there. I dash straight to my glasses the minute a heat is over! That's why the bright eyeglass case is a good suggestion.

 

[Warren J. Dew]

For me, if not wearing glasses is reliably 1 cut higher, that would be enough to not wear glasses.

That makes perfect sense for ladies. For sufficiently nearsighted men, you can't just take the glasses off; you have to use contacts. I did eventually find that I could use contacts with my spherical correction only - no cylindrical correction - which reduced some of the hassle of having to deal with toric lenses.

 

[lucia_l]

Warren,
I'm very nearsighted, so I agree with you. If I were a lead: I'd definitely need contacts to have some hope of seeing the edge of the floor and not dancing my partner off into the carpet!

Also, leads aren't presented with the "eyemakeup" challenge. As singndance noted, lot of eyemakeup and contacts can be difficult.

I did used to wear contacts. Occasionally mascara flakes would drop in my eyes. This was a big pain-in-the-eye. I'd take out the contact, rinse and put it back in. But that's not feasible on the dancefloor. And people who only wear contacts a few times a year have a hard time inserting and removing while wearing thick and fuzzy as a furry caterpillar false eyelashes.

So the choices and tradeoffs are different.

 

[Cal]

Female Leader here, and I do use eye makeup and false eyelashes. Whether I’m Leader or Follower, I take off my glasses. But I can still see fine on the dance floor. I used to sometimes wear contacts, but then it was a hassle to have to keep a pair of readers handy so that I could check my heat list or assist others with their hooks-and-eyes or pinning numbers or whatnot.

I have a female amateur partner who wears glasses, and she wears them when she competes (she’s a Follower), and she does not wear eye makeup. We’re syllabus competitors and honestly, I don’t think it’s made any difference to our scores. I’m pretty sure she wore them the last time she competed with her Pro (again, syllabus) and I don’t recall anyone thinking that glasses affected her scores.

So, as others have said, weigh the pros/cons and make your decision. Then go out and dance well.

 

[snapdancer]

Here's a hypothesis as you why you scored better. It was not that the judges liked your appearance without glasses, it's that you actually danced better.

Many of us are visual and our sight is the primary means by which we keep track of what's going on around us. Blind people are sometimes thought to have better hearing than the rest of us. I disagree, an audiology test would turn out no better. Blind people are better at listening because (1) they have to be and (2) they don't have the distraction of sight.

When we dance, the connection is the means by which the partnership should communicate, but a visual person will still tend to weight visual input too much. Sometimes when dancing with a new person who's giving a poor connection, I suggest that they close their eyes and their dancing gets better immediately.

So when you lost your vision with your glasses off, and that sensory channel was shut down, you had to rely on your connection with your pro more and your dancing improved.

One way to prove or disprove my hypothesis would be to wear your glasses next time but close your eyes.

 

[Joe]

I did eventually find that I could use contacts with my spherical correction only - no cylindrical correction - which reduced some of the hassle of having to deal with toric lenses.

I did the same at first—the torics were pricey at the time I started wearing contacts. I could see well enough with the plain lenses, though any close up work was impossible, like reading a book. Eventually the torics came down in price enough that they made sense. (Though by then my vision had deteriorated such that I needed multifocal glasses—and I wasn't springing for multifocal contacts!)