oogle is celebrating the life of Altina ‘Tina’ Schinasi, an American artist, designer and inventor most known for designing the widely popular ‘cat-eye’ eyeglass frame, with a doodle on August 4, which marks her 116th birthday.
Schinasi was born on this day in 1907 in Manhattan, New York, to immigrant parents, the Google Doodle said in a blogpost. She designed the Harlequin eyeglass frame, which is known today as ‘cat-eye’ eyeglass frame. Schinasi also patented several other inventions throughout her career and produced documentaries, according to the blogpost.
Schinasi’s mother was a native of Salonia (then in the Ottoman Empire) and her father was a Sephardic Jewish Turk. She studied painting in Paris after graduating high school and that sparked her appreciation for the arts. After coming back to the US, she studied art at The Art Students League in New York and took a position as a window dresser for multiple stores on Fifth Avenue. During this time, she found herself working with and learning from prominent artists she admired such as Salvador Dalí and George Grosz, the blogpost said.