Maria 012

The Rodenstock company from Germany has been in business since the 1950's and probably much longer. For several decades, Rodenstock had the nice habit to give the name of a lady to each new series of glasses. Anita, Anja, Arabelle, Ariane, Beate, Bettina, Carola, Celia, Cora, Dita, Donna, Elfina, Ellen, Flora, Grazilla, Joanna, Juanita, Karina, Laurella, Lisette, Nina, Roxina, Sandra, Silvana, Stella, Tanja and even Domina :) are examples of such names stamped on the arms of Rodenstock glasses in my collection. I never came across a lady called Toxy but the pair shown here by Maria is called like that.
The Toxy glasses were kindly presented to me in 1996 by a beautiful lady who always hated her glasses but never threw them out. When I first paid her a visit, I mentioned my collection and she excused herself, returning a minute later with a box containing all her old glasses. "Here, these are for you, they are no good to me anymore". The box contained a dozen glasses spanning three decades and the Toxy pair was clearly the earliest. A few months later, we went through her old photo albums and this enabled me to put a year of manufacture on each pair. The lady bought the Toxy glasses in 1963 or 1964 and they were hyper modern at the time - one of the first frames that appeared on the market after a decade of cat eye glasses.
When Maria made her selection for the photo shoot, she noticed straightaway that the Toxy glasses gave her perfect eyesight and she kept them on for a while after posing in them during the photo shoot. Again, there is a lot of glare in the lenses but the model's eyes are perfectly visible.