Against polarised lenses

Almost every sunglasses brand sells polarisation as the upgrade, and for most sunglasses that is right. A polarised filter removes light that has bounced off a flat surface at a particular angle — water, wet tarmac, a car bonnet, snow — and the effect on glare is immediate and impressive.

It is also the wrong choice for this product, and the reason has nothing to do with cost.

Screens emit polarised light

An LCD panel produces polarised light by construction. Put a polarised lens in front of one and it dims. Rotate your head, and at certain angles it goes fully black. Many phones behave badly in portrait orientation with polarised sunglasses on, which is why people push their sunglasses up onto their forehead to read a message.

Now consider what Razzhood Glasses actually are. You look at your phone to sync a recording. You look at your phone to read the transcript. You look at your phone to search what you said last Tuesday, to change the silence timeout, to check the battery. The phone is the other half of the product.

Polarisation is a feature for looking at water. This is a device for looking at your phone.

A lens that fights the screen every time you take the phone out is not a premium option here. It is a defect with a price premium attached.

What we use instead

A UV400 tint. It blocks the same ultraviolet — the whole point of the exercise — costs roughly half as much to produce, and does nothing at all to your screen. We put the difference into the microphone housing, where you can hear it.

Every Razzhood lens is UV400: the clear one that comes free in the box, all six tints, the photochromic option, and any prescription lens we cut. There is no version of this product where eye protection is the upgrade.

The dangerous myth

Here is the part that deserves to be repeated everywhere, because most people have it backwards.

Ultraviolet protection has nothing to do with how dark a lens looks. It comes from the UV400 coating or from the lens material. Darkness is a comfort feature. Protection is a chemistry feature. They are independent.

Which produces a genuinely harmful failure case: a dark lens with no ultraviolet protection is worse than wearing nothing. The darkness makes your pupil open wider, and a wider pupil lets more ultraviolet reach the back of your eye than an unshaded, constricted one would.

That is what a cheap pair of sunglasses from a market stall usually is. It looks like protection, it feels like protection, it is doing the opposite, and there is no way to see the difference by holding it up to the light.

Tint, then, is only taste

Once protection is settled and identical across the range, colour becomes a preference rather than a specification. Light Gray is neutral and takes brightness down without shifting colour. Light Red Gold is warm, and lifts contrast in flat light — overcast mornings, dusk, under tree cover — at the cost of a faint warm cast on everything.

Ten dollars, two tints, pick the one you like. Nothing about your eyes depends on the answer, and the reasons to prefer one are about how you look, not how you see.