What To Consider When Choosing Ski Goggles

A day skiing or snowboarding can be easily ruined if you fail to choose the proper goggles. You want to ensure that your goggles fit accurately, provide maximum comfort, assure the best visibility, allow ventilation, and protect against wind and Ultraviolet radiation. In terms of fit and ease, it all comes down to how your goggles fit your face with back foam as well as how the strap is placed around the helmet ensuring stability as well as an optimized visual field with great peripheral vision. A recent study showed that ski helmet uses with goggles increase skiers’ reaction time to peripheral stimuli.

Goggle lenses are the primary factor in goggles’ differences. When selecting ski and snowboard goggles with the proper lenses, there are a few key factors to take into account, including lens type, lens color, and additional characteristics like fog resistance and glare protection. There are two types of goggle lenses: Flat (Cylindrical) Lenses and spherical (bubbly) lenses. Flat lenses have a horizontal curvature but a vertical flatness. At a cheaper cost, cylindrical lenses provide good performance. Conversely, spherical goggle lenses bend both horizontally and vertically around your face, giving the goggles a bubbly appearance. Using cylindrical lenses has many benefits besides just the way they look, such as improved peripheral vision, less glare, less fogging, and less distortion.

Skiing and snowboarding require seeing clearly. You can’t enjoy your day skiing if you cannot see clearly, whether it’s due to poor definition on a day with poor lighting or too much brightness on a sunny day. If you fail to choose the correct lens color on a day with poor visibility, it’s possible to experience more bumps, ski more defensively, and tire more quickly.

The darkness of the lens determines its suitability for weather conditions. Lenses have category numbers and percentages classifying their darkness. Visible Light Transmission, or VLT, is the proportion of light that reaches your eyes through a lens. The lens would perform better on a sunny day if the percentage was lower because less light is let through. A low VLT number such as 12 percent reduces eye fatigue on sunny days and a high VLT number such as 75 percent improves color and depth perception on low-light days. The VLT is then converted into a lens category number for simpler comprehension.
Lightly tinted glasses for drab, cloudy, and foggy days are classified as Category 1 / S1 – Light.
The majority of weather situations are well-suited to Category 2 / S2 – Medium – Excellent all-around lens tints.
For sensitive eyes and bright, sunny days, Category 3 / S3 – Dark lenses are suitable because they block out the majority of the sun’s rays.
Category 4 / S4 – Extremely Dark – Very dark lenses for strong, intense light and high-altitude glaciers.
All high-quality ski goggle lenses are guaranteed to block 100% of UVA, UVB, and UVC radiation, which can cause skin aging, burning, and cancer.

Depending on the colors that are transmitted on a given day, your eyes will pick up specific color spectrums and will detect certain light wavelengths. On a sunny day, blue light has a high intensity, which weakens other colors and causes eye tiredness. Contrarily, in overcast conditions, brightness is reduced and there is less contrast but more diffused light. The wavelengths of blue and orange provide good contrast. Vision and contrast are hampered by green and red wavelengths.
Different colored goggle lenses have varied effects on everyone’s eyes. Some people like a yellow lens for flat light, while others will choose one with a tint of pink or orange. Try on different goggles before buying and look through various colored lenses on a bright light as well as darker corners and see which suits you more.

A suitable lens for misty, dreary days is clear (Cat.0-1). On days like this, you only need something to block the snow and wind; they won’t provide you any tint to shield you from the sun. Also suitable for tobogganing at high speeds and night skiing.
Illuminator, Yellow, Blue, and Green (Cat.1) – a lens that provides you light when there is none by giving your eyes the appearance of light! On those dreary, flat-light days, these will highlight your surroundings, giving you more contrast and definition. They give gray days a more livelier feeling.

Pink, Orange, Amplifier (Cat. 1-2): One of the most universal lens hues, maximizing contrast and details; frequently available in darker and lighter shades; darker for sunny days, lighter for gray days. enhancing the beneficial light that improves contrast while still allowing you to block out undesirable light. The fantastic all-purpose amplifier lens performs incredibly well in a variety of lighting conditions, from bright to foggy.
Brown, Mirrored Sun Blocker (Cat.3) – On sunny days, your eyes can rest thanks to a lens with a dark tint that blocks out a harsh, dazzling light.
The best lenses for everyday adaptability and hassle-free vision are photochromic/light sensitive (Cat.1-3/Cat.2-4). The lens may automatically darken and lighten depending on the light thanks to photochromic technology. Since the weather in the mountains is ever-changing, so are the shadows and contrasts.
Mirrored (Cat.2—3 depending on the base tint’s darkness) – For bright, sunny situations, the mirrored coating bounces light away. Any of the aforementioned color tints can be mixed with the mirrored coating to increase contrast or sun protection.

The truth is that no single pair of goggles can deliver the best visibility under all kinds of lighting and weather. Therefore, having a variety of lens colors available can aid in maximizing visibility and performance throughout the day and under various circumstances. This is where goggles with interchangeable lenses come in handy. The more you spend time skiing and snowboarding in the mountains, the more weather conditions you’ll encounter, and the more interchangeable lenses you will need.

Beyond just the lens type and color, goggle lens features to keep an eye out for include:

100% UV Protection: When you protect your eyes from UV radiation, you can avoid eye tiredness and retinal damage because UV intensity increases with altitude.

Mirrored Lenses: A goggle lens with a mirror coating on the outside reflects more light than one without one. Less light infiltration results in less glare and better visibility in bright lighting.

Polarized Lenses: Light has a tendency to reflect off of snow surfaces at higher intensities from angles perpendicular to the surface. Polarized lenses are able to minimize glare considerably more efficiently than a conventional mirrored lens while enhancing overall visual clarity and supplying greater contrast and definition since they function as a vertical light filter. Snow sports benefit greatly from polarized lenses since they ease the strain on the eyes.

Double Lenses: When compared to their single-lens predecessor, these form a thermal barrier that considerably lowers fogging. A single-lens goggle is just inadequate for skiing or snowboarding. Every new pair of ski and snowboard goggles has double lenses.

Anti-fog Coating: The inside of the lenses can be given a hydrophilic chemical treatment to significantly lessen a goggle’s propensity to fog. Different coatings have varying levels of durability. Because improper goggle maintenance can result in wiping off the anti-fog coating, be sure to heed the manufacturer’s instructions.

Photochromic lenses: When exposed to higher ultraviolet (UV) light, these lenses naturally darken, and when there is less UV light, they become lighter. The main benefit of this kind of lens is that it is incredibly adaptable and can change to changing situations. Sadly, photochromic lenses do not automatically adapt to changing light; this process could take several minutes.

Lenses PrizmTM: In order to increase contrast, Oakley’s Prizm Lens technology blocks specific color wavelengths in response to changing lighting conditions. These lenses are incredibly adaptable and, like photochromic lenses, have a wider range of light that they may be used in.