Today, sunglasses are a dime a dozen. They can be found
anywhere from your grocery store, dollar store, and
discount shopping center to high end boutiques, specialty
sunglass stores and department stores.
But people who are spending tons of money on sunglasses are
not necessarily getting better protection than the person
who paid one dollar for a pair.
Effective sunglasses will have proper UV protection. This
is what protects the wearer’s eyes from harmful UV rays.
Ultra Violet, or UV light contributes 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 98
percent of the suns harmful UV rays.
Today, even many of the eyeglasses we wear have a special
UV coating 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 polarized sunglasses are
what are needed.
These provide a great amount of glare protection and
surprisingly the same man who invented the Polaroid camera
invented the polarized sunglasses.
But for many people it is not really about protection. It
is about style. So there are now many designer sunglasses
that provide just as much protection. Buy something you
like and something that looks good on you. But make sure to
keep an eye on the UV protection rating.