pull the wool over eyes

To deceive, fool, or misdirect one, especially to gain an advantage. (Likely an allusion to the once-common practice of men of wearing large powdered wigs that resembled lambs' wool.) He tried pulling the wool over our eyes by hiding the profits in separate accounts, but we were quick to catch onto his scheme. Be prepared for your kids to try to pull the wool over your eyes when they're teenagers.

Fig. to deceive someone. You can't pull the wool over my eyes. I know what's going on. Don't try to pull the wool over her eyes. She's too smart.

To deceive; hoodwink.

To hoodwink or deceive someone. This term comes from—and long survives—the custom of wearing a wig (except in the British legal system, where judges and barristers still do so). One writer suggests that it alludes to the slippage of the wig of a judge, who is temporarily blinded by a clever lawyer. In any event, it was used figuratively in a quite general way from the early nineteenth century on, on both sides of the Atlantic. “He ain’t so big a fool as to have the wool drawn over his eyes in that way,” wrote Frances M. Whitcher (The Widow Bedott Papers, 1856).