I’m always on the lookout for great sunglasses because I spend so much time outdoors. And Colorado is blessed with a lotta sunshine. In fact, one of the marketing bullet points of my home town of Boulder, Colorado is that we have “over 300 days of sunshine per year” and it’s true, we really do have a lot of bright, sunny days!
Which means that having good eye protection is not only smart from a health perspective but it also significantly helps me function and see what’s going on around me when I’m outside too. Health? Yup, according to the National Institutes of Health:
Sunglasses are a great fashion accessory, but their most important job is to protect your eyes from the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays. Some of the sun’s effects on the eyes include:
- Cataracts, a clouding of the eye’s lens that can blur vision. An estimated 20% of cases are caused by extended UV exposure.
- Macular degeneration, resulting from damage to the retina that destroys central vision. Macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in the United States.
- Pterygium, a tissue growth over the white part of the surface of the eye that can alter the curve of the eyeball, causing astigmatism.
In other words, not only do they need to look cool and make you look good, but they’re significantly helping your eyes stay healthy too!
And so, here’s what I’m sporting now: The Native Eyewear Crestone in “Desert Tortoise” (tortoise shell) with brown lenses:
Nice, eh? I particularly like that Native has redesigned the nose pad and no longer relies on a replaceable rubber rest but instead has a small rubber element embedded into the glasses themselves. This is important because my last much loved pair of Native Eyewear glasses had replaceable nose pads and after a few years I couldn’t actually get replacements. Then I lost one.
Problem solved:
The other question is about the hinge, and they’ve done a nice job with that too, clearly a company that’s made a lot of sunglasses and learned a lot about how to make a hinge that’ll last for thousands – or tens of thousands – of open/close events.
Here’s a look:
The company offers a number of different lens colors, but after trying various shades, I have to say that I am quite partial to the brown lenses. If you haven’t tried brown sunglass lenses, you’re really missing out: it really makes things more colorful and greens become vivid, kind of like having your saturation +1 the entire time you’re outside. Which is a pretty cool effect!
These are a great pair of sunglasses and I am now constantly fighting with my kids to be able to retain possession of them. They’re also pretty darn reasonable for really good sunglasses; about $129 through Native Eyewear, and possibly a bit cheaper if you hunt around online. I say, if you’re not wearing sunglasses, you need some. And if you have sunglasses, I bet these Native glasses are an upgrade!
Disclosure: Native Eyewear sent me these sunglasses for the purposes of this writeup. Which was really excellent because I was poised and ready to buy them for myself!