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Often in anime which features a character who wears glasses, when they take
off their glasses, their eyes turn into a sort of puckered lip emoticon that
looks like the number 3.

![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/S0JDv.gif)

The meaning is fairly obvious, that the character looks drastically different
or worse without their glasses on. But why is this icon used, specifically?


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tropes
When characters take off their glasses, why do their eyes turn into a "lip eyes" icon?


The "3" is a stylized (and humorous) way of showing the characters squinting
their eyes, which then look somewhat like a "3".

Most glasses wearer -- especially the young ones -- are short-sighted, so
whenever they take off their glasses, they start squinting. The "3" is used in
a similar fashion to depict pouting characters, like with the following emoji:

(°3°)

A variation of this is the famous へのへのもへじ (henohenomoheji), which uses
Hiragana characters that look somewhat like facial features and is used almost
exclusively for humorous purposes:

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sWo03.jpg)](http://en.rocketnews24.com/2013/09/26/hiragana-
art-creating-pictures-using-the-japanese-syllabary/)  
Image taken from
[RocketNews24](http://en.rocketnews24.com/2013/09/26/hiragana-art-creating-
pictures-using-the-japanese-syllabary/)


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In this scene, Marii goes on to ask "Why the Nobita Face?". The fact that she
refers to the trope as thus would indicate that it's the origin or at least
the most famous version of the trope.

[From a previous question I
asked](https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/4985/what-exactly-is-a-
nobita-face?lq=1):

> From the Doraemon Wikia:
>
> Nobita's eyes are never drawn consistently. Sometimes they look like the
> number 3, sometimes they're black beaded, and sometimes, like in the case of
> the recent movies, they're normal eyes.
>
> ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DynTN.jpg)


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