Looking after ski gloves, which mostly means drying them properly

How gloves actually die

Not by wearing out. Three specific failures account for almost every glove that gets replaced, and two of them are caused by handling rather than use.

• The inner liner pulls loose. The lining detaches at the fingertips, bunches up, and the glove becomes impossible to put on. This is caused by pulling gloves off by the fingertips, which everybody does.
• Direct heat. A radiator or a hot air vent hardens leather, shrinks a waterproof insert and can separate glued seams. Same mechanism as ski boot liners, same result.
• A split palm seam. The one genuine wear failure, from gripping poles and pushing off the snow, and the only one that is really about use.

Drying, every night

1. Open the cuff fully and undo any wrist cinch.
2. Pull the liner back into shape if it has bunched, working from the cuff toward the fingers.
3. Stand them fingers up. A rack, a mug, a bulldog clip on a line - anything that lets air fall into the finger tubes rather than being trapped.
4. Room temperature, moving air, away from any heat source.
5. Turn them once if they are very wet.

For a family skiing consecutive days, this is one of the genuine arguments for a boot dryer: gloves go on the same machine as boots, and the dryer page is honest about when you need one and when moving air is enough.

Why the second pair is not optional

For any child, and for adults skiing wet spring snow, one pair is not enough. A child’s gloves are soaked by lunch, there is no drying them on a mountain, and the afternoon then happens with cold wet hands.

A dry spare in an adult’s jacket pocket is the highest-value item carried on a family ski day, and it costs less than an hour of anybody’s lift ticket. The sizing page covers buying them, including why buying a size up for a child makes their hands colder rather than warmer.

Washing, rarely and carefully

Gloves need washing much less often than outerwear, and the trigger is smell or visible grime rather than a schedule. Once a season is plenty.

Fabric gloves

Check what the maker publishes for the specific model first. As a general approach: hand wash in cool water with a small amount of mild detergent, squeeze gently rather than wringing, rinse thoroughly so no detergent stays in the insulation, press out the water in a towel, and air dry fingers up away from heat. Never a tumble dryer.

Leather and leather-palm gloves

Do not soak them and do not use detergent. Wipe with a damp cloth, dry slowly at room temperature, and treat with a leather conditioner or a proofing wax once a season while the leather is slightly damp. Leather that has been allowed to dry hard cracks along the flex lines and does not come back.

Restoring water repellency

The outside of a glove has a durable water repellent finish, and like the finish on a jacket it wears off. When it goes, the shell fabric wets out and the glove feels cold and clammy even though the waterproof insert underneath is intact.

A spray-on or wash-in reproofer restores it, applied to a clean glove and, with heat-set products, cured according to the instructions - which is one of the very few times warmth is applied to a glove deliberately, and it should be the gentlest setting available. The same product and the same logic as reproofing a jacket.

A useful test: hold the back of the glove under a tap. If water beads and runs off, the finish is fine. If it darkens and soaks in, it is time to reproof.

Repairs worth doing

• A split palm seam. Genuinely repairable with a heavy needle and waxed thread, or by a cobbler, and worth doing on a good pair.
• A small tear in the shell. Repair tape works on gloves the same way it works on a jacket. The repair page has the method.
• A detached liner. Sometimes fixable by reattaching the fingertips with a few stitches, if you can reach them. Often not, and this is where gloves end.
• A failed wrist cinch or clip. Cosmetic on most gloves and a nuisance on a gauntlet cuff. Hardware repairs are here.
• Broken zip on a gauntlet. A cobbler job rather than a home one.

Check whether anything is published

Glove warranties are unusual, which is why it is worth noticing when one exists. Of the gloves in this ledger, the OutdoorMaster models publish a two-year warranty and the others publish no term at all. That does not make the others bad - but a maker who publishes a term is stating something, and a claim is a good deal cheaper than a replacement.

The glove roundup ranks the field on published insulation, warranty and construction, and the lifespan page puts gloves in context: three to five years for most households, which is short by the standards of everything else in a gear bag.

Summer storage

Clean, completely dry, liner pulled into shape, stored flat or loosely rather than compressed at the bottom of a bag. A glove stored damp grows mildew in the insulation and comes out of storage smelling in a way that washing does not entirely fix.

This is the same routine as everything else in April, and the storage page has the whole list - of which the single rule is that nothing goes away wet.