Your Most Effective Sunglasses

Today, sunglasses seem to be a dime a dozen. They can be found anywhere from your supermarket, to the grocery store, dollar store, and discount shopping center to high end boutiques, specialty sunglass stores and department stores. They are everywhere and you can find them in any price range.  But how can you find out whether or not they are effective and do what they need to do, which is protecting your eyes from UV radiation?

Does Expensive equal Effective?

Some people spend a ton of money on sunglasses and think they must have made the right choice, based on the price. Extensive research has been done to prove that a high price often leads to a high quality perception of a product.

But spending a lot more does not necessarily guarantee that you're getting better protection than the person who paid 29 dollars for their pair. How effective your sunnies are depends almost exclusively on the quality of the lenses in protecting you from UV radiation.

Effective protection against eye conditions

So, effective sunglasses will have proper UV protection. This is what protects the wearer’s eyes from harmful UV rays. Ultra Violet, or UV light is known to contribute to cataracts, macular degeneration of the retina and blindness.

To prevent these conditions, sunglass lenses should be coated with UV protection. Today, the industry standard for sunglasses is UV400. This protects your eyes from about 99 percent of the sun's harmful UV rays.

Effective extra features

Most sun eyeglasses you can buy today have a special UV coating built in inside the lens to protect our eyes, even though the lenses are clear. But there are also other things sunglasses do to protect your eyes. For people who work out of doors or spend a lot of time on the water or snow, then a special feature like polarized lenses are what is needed.

These provide a great amount of glare protection and perhaps not surprisingly the same man who invented the Polaroid camera invented the polarized sunglasses.