Sunglasses for skiing and snow: when polarized helps, when it hides the ice

On snow in bright sun, the right sunglasses are dark or mirrored, cover the sides, and carry a UV claim you trust; polarized is a bonus that cuts the glitter. In flat light, under cloud, the answer flips: a dark lens hides the terrain, a light contrast tint shows it, and a polarizing film can remove the faint sheen that is your only warning of ice. And on a storm day or a cold one, sunglasses are the wrong tool altogether. Goggles seal, cover the sides and handle wind and snowfall; sunglasses are for lift lines, spring sun and the walk up.

Bright sun on snow

This is the harshest light most people will ever put their eyes in. Snow reflects up to about eighty percent of the ultraviolet that hits it, so UV arrives from below as well as above. Altitude adds more. The visible light is intense and comes from every direction.

What you want:

• A dark lens or a mirror over a dark base. A mirror reflects a slice of light before it enters the lens, which is why snow lenses are so often mirrored. The Ice Blue Mirror and Dark Blue Mirror are the pairs built for this.
• Side coverage. Light from below and the sides gets behind a flat frame. Wraps, side shields or goggles close the gap.
• A UV claim you trust. Snow blindness is a corneal sunburn from a few hours of UV on bright snow. It is real and it is preventable. Our snow blindness post covers it, and our UV400 vs polarized post explains the labels.

Polarized helps here. The glitter off a sunlit slope is partly polarized reflection and the film removes some of it, which reduces squinting over a long day.

Flat light: the answer flips

On an overcast day the light comes from the whole sky at once. There are no shadows, so bumps, dips and ice all look like the same white. This is flat light, and it is the condition that causes most falls on groomed runs.

Two things change:

A dark lens is wrong. There is not much light, and what there is carries the only information you have. A yellow, rose, amber or light brown lens raises contrast and makes the terrain read. Our cloudy days post covers low-light tints.

Polarized can hurt. In flat light, the difference between snow and ice is often a faint sheen: ice reflects a little, snow does not. That reflection is polarized, and a polarizing film removes it. Skiers who ride in flat light a lot often prefer non-polarized lenses for exactly this reason. It is the same debate as golf greens, with higher stakes.

So: bright day, polarized mirror. Grey day, non-polarized contrast tint, and probably goggles.

Goggles or sunglasses?

Goggles are the better tool for skiing most of the time. They seal against wind and snowfall, they cover the sides completely, the foam keeps the lens off your face so they fog less, and they take a helmet. Sunglasses have three jobs on the mountain:

• Lift lines and lunch. Anything where goggles are off.
• Spring skiing. Warm, sunny, no wind, when goggles are hot.
• The way up. Ski touring and snow hiking, where you are working hard and a goggle would fog.

If you are choosing sunglasses for the last one, the fogging post explains why a frame that sits slightly off the face beats a sealed wrap on a climb.

Which of ours, and for what

For sunny days on snow, the Ice Blue Mirror. Its base tint under the coating is what you see through, and the frame maker does not state it, which we say plainly. The T01 is a flat rectangular frame with no side shields, so for a full day on a glacier it is not enough coverage; for a spring afternoon or the walk up it is. We do not publish a transmission figure, because none has been measured; the product pages say so.

Frequently asked questions