Some celebrity endorsements are worth less than the paper they’re printed on, but an organic, profane takedown from a festival stage? That can cut through the noise. Pop star Lorde did exactly that at Madrid’s Mad Cool Festival last week, using her set to torch Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses. A Ray-Ban sponsor happened to be watching.
“Increasingly in our world, it gets harder and harder to know what is real,” Lorde told the crowd. “You don’t know if someone is wearing sunglasses, or if they’re wearing those f—ed up, f—ing [AI glasses]. Can I just say, for the record, f— the glasses. Don’t get the glasses. Not sexy.” The context is important: she performed right before Jennie, a Ray-Ban Meta ambassador, and the festival itself is backed by the eyewear giant. This wasn’t a stray thought. It was a pointed refusal of a product that has become a privacy lightning rod.
Security experts have spent months calling the glasses a nightmare, and the lawsuits are piling up. One particularly grim allegation claims Kenyan contract workers were forced to watch graphic videos captured with the glasses to train Meta’s AI. Meta has publicly insisted it takes privacy seriously, pointing to features like a visible recording light, but the company hasn’t detailed a response to that specific claim. And yet the sales numbers tell a completely different story. EssilorLuxottica moved more than 7 million units in 2025 alone—triple the total from the previous two years combined. Consumer enthusiasm seems immune to legal and ethical headaches.
Lorde’s critique lands differently because it sidesteps the policy debates entirely and goes for the gut. By calling the glasses fundamentally uncool, she’s attacking the product’s identity, not just its safeguards. Privacy fears can be abstract. Feeling like a walking surveillance device at a party is immediate. She doubled down on her thesis by contrasting the creepy, always-recording glasses with what she called truly sexy: “The here and now.” For a gadget that promises to augment reality, the real turn-off might be how thoroughly it cheapens the moment you’re standing in.
