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.