At my first casting in this city, nineteen and terrified, I wore sunglasses into the room because I'd been crying in the parking lot and it seemed easier than explaining. The casting director looked at me for a long second and said, 'Keep them on.' I booked the job. I would love to tell you I learned some profound lesson about authenticity that day, but what I actually learned was: keep them on.
Here is what sunglasses do in a photograph, technically speaking. They put a hard black graphic shape in the middle of the softest, most complicated part of the image. They give the eye somewhere to land. They hide the twelve tiny muscles around your eyes that broadcast 'I am on hour six of this shoot and the craft table is out of almonds.' A model's face is a paragraph; sunglasses edit it down to one good sentence. Art directors love one good sentence.
They are also, and I cannot stress this enough, medical equipment. I get light-triggered migraines, which is a fun thing to have in a city that is 91% glare. The sunglasses mean I can shoot at noon in a parking lot surrounded by white stucco and chrome bumpers and still drive myself home afterward. The glamour industry runs on unglamorous logistics. Ask anyone who's worn vinyl in July.
People online occasionally decide the sunglasses are a persona, that I'm hiding, that I think I'm too cool. My mother has asked, gently, whether clients know what I look like. (They do. There's a tank-top photo from the pink wall shoot, no glasses, tattoos out, squinting like a mole, that my agent calls 'proof of face.' It's in every deck.) The truth is less interesting than the theories: they work, they help, and after seven years they're as much a part of my kit as my walk.
But the real answer, the one I give on set when someone asks: the sunglasses mean the photo isn't finished. A fully readable face closes the story: you know what she's thinking, done, scroll on. Half a face keeps the question open, and an open question is what makes someone stop with their thumb mid-air. I'm not hiding anything behind them. I'm leaving room for you.