Tech companies have discovered that cameras on your face become easier to normalize when they look less like surveillance equipment and more like fashion.

For years, the biggest problem with smart glasses wasn’t technology, but the person standing across from you wondering whether they were being recorded.

Google Glass learned that lesson painfully early. Meta has done much better by hiding its technology inside familiar Ray-Ban frames. Now it’s taking the strategy further.

Meta recently launched an expanded line of AI glasses with 26 styles, including Meta Glasses by Kylie, designed in collaboration with Kylie Jenner. Meta describes them as a slim oval frame inspired by her personal style.

Fashion press has already coined a useful term for the broader trend:

“Surveillance chic.”

I think the term captures something important about how difficult technologies become normalized.

You stop pushing solely the tech’s capabilities.

And you make it fashionable.

Attracting women is particularly important to making camera glasses socially acceptable.

Women have also been among the most vocal critics of cameras worn on people’s faces, for understandable reasons.

I’ve written about Meta’s glasses before, and responses from female readers have been overwhelmingly negative.

The concern isn’t hypothetical.

Videos filmed using Meta glasses have become popular among pickup artists and prank creators, including men approaching and harassing women who don’t know they’re being recorded.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri recently said the platform would crack down on this content, yet Business Insider found numerous examples continuing to circulate. 

Meta emphasizes that its glasses have a capture LED that flashes while recording, and that blocking or disabling the light should automatically disable the camera. It recently strengthened the system to detect physical tampering with the LED. 

But even that’s pretty revealing.

A fashion accessory shouldn’t need increasingly sophisticated technology to prevent its owner from defeating the feature designed to tell everyone else what it’s up to.

There’s a much broader marketing story here.

Tech companies have been using femininity to humanize technology for years.

Siri, Alexa and other assistants were historically presented predominantly through female voices. Researchers have examined how this feminization makes artificial assistants appear more approachable, accommodating and familiar. 

Now cameras are getting girled-up.

And Meta isn’t alone.

The rumoured camera-equipped AirPods are suddenly much less rumoured. A video found last week inside Apple‘s macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate appears to demonstrate AirPods using cameras to give Siri visual awareness of the wearer’s surroundings.

Reports suggest they’re intended for visual intelligence rather than conventional photography or video recording, but the privacy debate fired up almost immediately. 

We’re approaching an important point in wearable technology.

Cameras are migrating from devices we deliberately hold up to devices we simply wear.

Phones.

Glasses.

And coming soon, earbuds.

One of the ideas I explore in I Need That is that adoption depends on more than solving the product owner’s need. Products exist in social environments, and the reactions of people surrounding the buyer can become part of the adoption barrier.

That’s especially true when one person’s product changes another person’s privacy.

Meta can make its glasses beautiful. Kylie Jenner can make ‘em fashionable. Millions of folks can buy in.

But there’s another participant in every interaction who never bought the product.

The person standing in front of the camera.

And convincing THEM is definitely the real marketing problem.

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.