You know how it goes, you walk into a warm pub on a cold evening and your glasses fog up covering your eyes in mist. For glasses wearers it’s an old story, and one that happens time and time again. So you take them off and clean them. It’s embarrassing but not that difficult to sort out. Nevertheless it happens often enough to be annoying, and fogged up eyes can look rather silly, like an excited cartoon character. And you can’t see anything temporarily, which is bad when you’ve just arrived and you’re trying your best to track down your friends. Surely there’s something can be done? So you’d think anyway…
Anti-fog technology has been around for a while. It was developed by NASA in the mid-sixties for space helmets, and there’s plenty of sports glasses with hydrophillic surfaces for cyclists, snowboarders and other sportsmen. So, what about spectacle wearers? Somehow, anti-fog has not made its way to mainstream glasses yet, besides being prevalent on even the cheaper safety glasses. You’d imagine there would be demand for it, but strangely not, thankfully there are also lots of home solutions. Deep sea divers are known to spit in their goggles to keep them from fogging up, and this technique works, but while gobbing on your goggles is one thing, if you don’t want to spit on your designer frames there are other ways to keep the condensation at bay. A popular solution is to apply washing up liquid, or other detergents such as soap or shampoo, and buff them off without water. This is considered to last a couple of days, but it can smear. Shaving cream can be applied in a similar manner, squirted on and then buffed off with a cloth, and steeping in white vinegar and hot water is said to do the trick.
All this seems like a lot of effort to go to just to not have to get your glasses cloth out, and in this day and age with technology as it is, you’d imagine a more permanent solution to be available, or even as standard integrated into lens coatings. Maybe one day it will, but with the levels of technological expertise we see today, it really should be on the market already. In the meantime, anti-fog ski goggle wipes are good, or just your usual microfibre cloth to break through the fog, applied with a bit of patience.
Rob currently works for Oakley sunglasses specialist Direct Sight. He is a keen sportsman, online blogger and a general fan of sunglasses. This article was written by a guest author. Would you like to write for us?