You'll Soon Have to Pose for Passport Photos Sans Glasses

Seventy-five percent of American adults use some sort of vision correction—but come November 1, The Points Guy reports, they'll no longer be allowed to wear their glasses in passport photos.

Each September, the U.S. Department of State (DOS) celebrates Passport Awareness Month. This year, they're marking the occasion with #PicturePerfectPassport, a social media campaign to improve applicants’ photos.

Believe it or not, bad headshots are the main reason passport applications are delayed—and in 2015 alone, more than 200,000 passport applications were deferred due to inadequate photos, the foreign affairs agency revealed in a news release. One of the main reasons they rejected people’s headshots? The shiny glare from their glasses. (Other issues included bad lighting, low quality images and/or paper, too-old photos, and shots that were taken either too close or too far away.)

If you submit a bad passport photo for consideration, the DOS must contact you and request that you send a new one by snail mail. So to save everyone time and money, the agency used the #PicturePerfectPassport campaign to announce the new no-glasses guideline.

For more information on what's allowed—and what isn't—in your passport photo, visit the DOS’s website. And in the meantime, keep in mind that officials are expecting a massive wave of 10-year passport renewals for 2016. If your documentation expires soon and you've made international travel plans, squinting through a photo session might be the least of your worries if you don't take immediate steps to renew it.