If you have a child in your life between roughly five and ten years old, and you want to give them one thing that has a non-trivial chance of changing how they see the world for the rest of their lives, here is what we'd recommend. A real magnifying glass. Specifically, a 10x hand lens, the kind a geologist or a botanist uses, glass not plastic. They cost between $10 and $25.
Not the bright-colored plastic ones at the toy store. Those are fine for a few weeks, but the lenses are bad, the magnification is weak, and the kid figures out within a month that they're not really seeing anything new. The whole point of a magnifying glass is that it shows you something that wasn't visible before. A toy lens doesn't do that. A real one does.
What a 10x lens actually shows you.
A 10x hand lens, held an inch from your eye and an inch from the thing you're looking at, will show you, in sharp focus:
- The compound eye of a fly, with its individual hexagonal facets.
- The sawdust on a beetle's back from chewing into a log.
- The hooked hairs on a bumblebee's leg that hold pollen.
- The structure of a moth wing, which is not a flat sheet but a layered set of microscopic colored scales.
- The jaws of an ant, which look in person like nothing and through a 10x lens look like the front of an industrial machine.
- The seed of a dandelion, which is not just fuzz but an architectural marvel of fibers attached to a central stalk.
- The pollen on a flower's anthers, which is yellow at human scale and looks, magnified, like grains of sand.
None of this is visible without the lens. With the lens, all of it is right there, in your backyard, on a Saturday morning, two feet from the kid's bedroom window.
What happens when you give one to a kid.
The first day, they look at everything. Their hand. The carpet. A piece of bread. Their own eyelash. They are figuring out what the tool does.
The second day, they take it outside. They look at grass blades, at the cracks in the sidewalk, at a pebble. They start to get bored, because most of what they look at first is structurally simple.
Then, around the third or fourth day, something happens. They find an insect. Maybe a small ant on a leaf, maybe a beetle on the porch railing. They look at it through the lens and they go quiet. The thing they had previously thought of as just "a bug" turns out, through 10x glass, to be a complete machine. It has parts. It has eyes. It has intricate mouthparts. It does things.
The change in the kid is not subtle. Their world has gotten more interesting, in a way that a screen cannot make their world more interesting, because the kid is doing the looking themselves and the things they're looking at are real.
From that point, the lens becomes part of how they go outside. They develop the muscle memory of holding it close to the eye, of moving slowly toward the subject, of waiting for it not to move. They start finding things you wouldn't find. They become, in a small way, a naturalist. The tool gave them permission to look, and what they see rewards the looking.
What to buy.
A BelOMO 10x triplet hand lens is the well-known good one, around $25. It folds into a metal case that protects the glass when it's in a pocket. The optics are sharp at the edges, not just the center, which matters when a kid is figuring out how to use it. The case can take a beating — we've seen one of these survive being dropped in a river by a six-year-old.
Cheaper alternative: a Bausch & Lomb 10x Hastings triplet, around $15. Smaller, slightly less robust, but optically excellent.
Either one is approximately the same as buying a microscope, except the kid can put it in their pocket and take it on a hike. We recommend giving it with no instructions and seeing what happens.
If you don't have a kid in your life: buy one for yourself. It works for adults too. The world at 10x is a different world. It's been there the whole time.
— The editors