Best prescription cycling glasses - Sun protection and vision correction
Not a fan of contact lenses? Worrღy not, the best prescription cycling glasses are designed to protect your eyes and allo🧔w you to see clearly

The precise number of people who need vision correction isn’t clear, but aggregating various statistics puts it somewhere around the 40 per cent mark. While a significant number can either manage without correction while riding and simply use the 澳洲幸运5开奖官网在线查询开奖结果:best cycling glasses or can at least use contact lenses underneath, it still leaves a large number of riders 𒀰out there who will be wondering which are the best prescription cycling꧟ glasses for them.
While you could just wear your normal specs while riding, you’ll quickly come up against some serious drawbacks. Normal glasses first and foremost don't offer any UV filtration (unless you happen to have photochromic lenses). They aren’t designed to shield the eyes from wind at the speeds you’ll travel on a bike, and you may find they slip down your nose as they’re only really designed to stay on while you’re upright,🥂 rather than🍌 the leant-forward position that being on a bike requires.
Keep reading and we’ll take you through the different types of prescription cycling glasses out there today, the pros and cons of each type, as well as a𝔍 few recommendations.
What types of prescription cycling glasses are available?
You've got various options if you are after prescription cycling sunglasses. You can have lenses that are both corrective and tinted (known as Direct Glaze), clip-in lenses that sit behind a standard set of tinted lenses 🎃(Indirect Glaze), a hybrid of the two where the corrective lens is bonded to the tinted one, and then there are flip-up lenses to round things out.
Each option has pros and cons, and implicatꦑions for cost too, so read on to se𒈔e which might be the best option for you.
Direct Glaze
The most subtle option out there is what’s known as Direct Glaze, which is where the lenses of the sunglasses are themselves corrective as♏ well as handling the UV protection. At a glance they look like any other pair of sunglasses, and without trying them on you wouldn’t really be able to tell that they’re not.
While these are a great option if you want to av🅺oid inserts (we’ll get to those shortly), they are limited in the styles you can find them in. The problem is that, generally speaking, people tend to have one eye worse tha🍸n the other to some degree, which makes monolens designs impossible to manufacture. If you’re after something like the Oakley Sutro you’re going to need inserts, but if you’re perfectly happy with dual lens designs then there are a myriad of options out there from a wide range of manufacturers. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a dual lens design, after all it’s what most glasses use, when it comes to cycling sunglasses the trend towards large monolens designs has brought increased protection and a greater field of vision.
Prescription Inserts / Indirect Glaze
If you’re after a more contemporary looking pair of prescription cycling sunglasses then inserts are going to be the wಞay to go. The system is very simple, and basically just involves a second pair of clear corrective lenses that sit behind the main lens, closer to your eyes.
Given that large monolens sunglasses have to sit farther away from the face so as to not interfere with the cheeks there is room behind for the corrective inserts. The bonus is that they’re often removable so if you occasionally wear contact lenses you can simply take the inserts out and use them like any otheꦅr pair of cycling glasses.
In an opposite manner to the issues faced by direct glaze, inserts🌳 only really work for larger lenses. Dual lens sunglasses tend to sit closer 🍌to the eyes, meaning there isn't really any room for a secondary pair of lenses to sit behind.
Oakley offers a hybrid option on some of its models such as the perennial Jawbreaker, whereby the corrective lens is physically bonded to the monolens. This has the added advantage of giving one fewer surface to potentially fog up, as well as negating any potent🔴ial distortion between the two lenses.
Flip-ups
When I say flip-up sunglasses you probably think of a set of aviators, perhaps worn by your grandpa for driving on a summer’s day (that may just be my childhood memory though). For those of us with particularly strong prescriptions, it may be that a flip-up system is the only option for sporဣts-specific eyewear. Inserts usually have an upper limit of how much correction they🅷 can accommodate, beyond which you’ll be confined to a flip-up system.
While they may not necessarily be as en vogue as other options they’ll still 🍬provide more wind and debris protection than standard glasses, plus you can easily swap between sun and shade with ease.
Non-cycling prescription sunglasses
While we&rsquo🍸;ll touch on price later, it’s no secret to anyone that needs glasses that prescription lenses don’t come cheap, and so investing in a pair of prescription cycling glasses that you may only use a few times a week might not be the right choice for everyone.
While sunglasses glasses designed for cycling are going to be better than a pair not designed with speed on two wheels in mind, it’s worth noting that you can still have a great riding experience on a pair of sport-oriented casual prescription sungla🍌sses too, which you will then be more lik🐬ely to wear off the bike and maximise your investment.
Our advice w﷽ould be to look for grippy arms and nose pieces, or even better go and try a pair on and shake your head about to test the retention.
The best prescription cycling glasses available today
The following list comprises glasses that feature in our main buyers guide to the best cycling sunglasses, but are also available with vision correct in one form or another, a🅠🐓s well as a few options that we think warrant inclusion for other reasons.