Click here for tips on buying the best shades for summer beachgoing.
Savona hails from Serengeti’s Cosmopolitan collection, which means they made me look a whole lot more sophisticated than I am. I strutted around town and sand wearing it in a shiny black frame with the kind of long vertical axis that pleases celebrities (“Hey, look at me! I’m incognito!”) I drew disappointed paparazzi. Neat touch: The inside of the gently wrapped, 6-base frame is done up in a crazy zebra mosaic. But don’t think all the hoopla means Savona skimps on lens quality. Serengeti loads it with a polarized, photochromic (24% to 9% visible light transmission), brown-tint glass they call Drivers. It’s a brilliant lens. Life springs to life. None of that copper wash that some brown tints lay on a scene. Drivers has all the restfulness of a green tint, but with brilliant sharpness—thanks to the wonders of glass and, perhaps, to filters that block bothersome blue light. $189. Buy it: Free Shipping at FramesDirect.com
Got a license to be hip? Then you can legally wear Tron. But you’ll give up nothing optically in the course of making your stand for total coolness. Tron boasts a shield look that’s increasingly popular on the street—that is, a one-piece lens crosses over the nose bridge, and though the wrap is 6-base (seems more like 8), it protects your eyes with gogglelike aplomb. The nonpolarized CR-39 lens with gray base tint is tapered—that is, thinner to the sides of the optical center (see “Optical Clarity” in our handy Glossary). It’s not a lens for super rough stuff, but my, is it at once sharp and restful. But the real reason you want Tron is for its frame detailing—namely, gala side temples, huge and louvered, and outrageously decorated. Mine was black with a splatter paint job, but behold here Tron in pink. And then some. $125. Buy it: Free Shipping at Zappos
The large, very masculine Embargo was issued to me in the leopardlike Havana frame with a polarized brown lens (14 percent VLT), and I wouldn’t have it any other way. (Though you’ve got lots of frame and lens options.) The 8-base wrapped frame is superthick at the corners of your eyes for max pro against sidelighting. Smith works wonders with lenses. These issue the expected “Wow,” but with a small side order of “Ahh.” Clarity is excellent—Smith tapers its lenses for impeccable resolution. Every detail at the beach will pop, even as the sun sinks slowly in whatever direction it’s going. $119. Buy it: framesdirect.com.
I wanted to believe.
You’ve seen the ads in the magazines. Free sunglasses. Supposedly for promotional purposes. I bit.
Now, I did have to fork out for postage and handling. But $18 for polarized sport shades with interchangeable lenses? Cool.
I wanted to believe.
I wore the brown lenses during a few bike rides. If you like the world in soft focus—a layer of brown gauze draped over life—these babies are for you.
Then I had a chance to test them out in an optical laboratory. The claimed near-perfect “actuity” (sic) didn’t pan out. Duh. When a diopter scope projected a definition pattern to represent their optical clarity, the pattern shifted way off axis and fuzzed out so that the evenly spaced test lines blurred together. It hurt to look at it.
The lab then tested their impact resistance. (The maker made no claims on this score, though I like to count on sport shades for some degree of protection.) The first standardized test, firing a little steel ball at the center of a lens, popped the lens right out. The second test, dropping a weighted cylinder, shattered the other lens to smithereens. Decent shades with polycarbonate lenses pass these tests with maybe a scratch or two. I now own an empty frame that retains just a few sharp shards.
Free sunglasses. Worth every penny.
The Tour de France is always a showcase of races within the race. So who’s winning the battle for sunglasses dominance in the 2008 Tour? So far it’s Oakley , although Rudy Project took today’s stage.
The first five stage winners all sported Oakleys: Alejandro Valverde (above), Thor Hushovd, Samuel Dumoulin, Stefan Schumacher, and Mark Cavendish. The current wearer of the yellow jersey, Kim Kirchen, is also an Oakley rider. (He and Cavendish both ride for the USA’s Team Columbia .)
Rudy Project got on the leaderboard today with a win by Italy’s Riccardo Ricco (below). But guess who forgot to put on his shades this morning? Oops.
Not to worry. Rudy Project has some great riders in the Tour, including Denis Menchov and Oscar Freire, both contenders for the yellow. Look for Oakley and Rudy Project to duke it out for the, uh, iridium jersey the next two and a half weeks.
