Recently, egorick posted a picture of a cyclist wearing a full face sun visor:

Co-incidentally, I just came across an old post on Sinosplice called China’s Solar Visor Craze which discusses the sun visor craze starting in 2004. I’m pretty sure that I saw these way back in 2002 in Guangdong, so it may have taken a while for them to spread to the rest of the country.

The popularity of these sun visors is in large part due to an obsession with protecting themselves from the sun. This is especially prevalent in Chinese women, who want to have milky white skin – traditionally peasant women had dark skin from working in the fields, wheras high class ladies spent most of their time indoors and had pale skin as a result.

Anyway, these sun visors are a very clever invention and they seem to be spreading – I recently saw a lady wearing one of these full face sun visors in the middle of Brisbane! Not really surprising given the large number of Chinese people in Brisbane, but it took me rather aback.