Did you know that those plastic novelty glasses adorned with the numerical shape of the New Year, the ones typically worn at New Year’s Eve parties, have only been around since the 1990’s? It was only a few weeks after New Year’s Day, on the night of January 27th, 1990, when two Seattle musicians, Peter Cicero and Richard Sclafani, began a brainstorming session regarding novelty glasses after a music jam in Cicero’s apartment. The first series of doodles they came up with looked like over-sized plastic fly swatters, then Cicero had the brilliant idea of New Year’s Eve glasses and then proceeded to fill up two pages of ideas. They then got together $36,000, hammered out a design, patented their idea, and by October of 1990 they had 10,000 of the “1991” glasses made up; they then went onto the market and instantly became a hit! Unfortunately, once they had the idea and started to market these glasses, other people started to knock them off; Cicero and Sclafani left the game in 2009, but over the course of time have sold over a million frames! Curious to see how these glasses have changed, and evolved over time? A point to note, pictures of NYE glasses during the 90’s are a hard find, so not all are listed; check out below for a timeline of NYE glasses!
1991
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015