What to wear on your eyes for night skiing

One number decides this: VLT

Visible light transmission is the percentage of light a lens lets through. A dark bluebird-day lens might publish 8 to 20 percent. An all-round lens sits somewhere in the thirties. A night or storm lens is 70 percent and up, and a genuinely clear lens approaches 90. The whole of this page is a consequence of that single scale, and the full VLT and lens color guide explains where each band comes from.

Under floodlights you have perhaps a hundredth of the light of a sunny afternoon, arriving from fixed points rather than from the whole sky. That does two things. It reduces the total amount of light your eye has to work with, and it flattens the shadows that tell you where the bumps are. A dark lens attacks the first problem in the wrong direction, and does nothing at all about the second.

Why not just take the goggles off

It is the obvious idea and it is worse than it sounds. At 20 mph in still air, your eyes are dealing with a 20 mph wind, and if it is snowing you are taking those flakes at the same speed. Night sessions are also colder than the same resort at midday, and wind on a cold eye waters, which is the actual mechanism by which people lose track of where they are going.

The alternative people reach for next is clear safety glasses or their normal prescription lenses. Neither seals against the face, so both let the wind in around the edges, and neither is built to sit under a helmet brow. The full comparison against sunglasses applies here with more force, because the one advantage sunglasses have during the day, which is being able to see when the light is good, has evaporated.

Three ways to solve it

One: buy a goggle that ships with two lenses

The simplest answer. The Smith Squad ChromaPop is the only goggle in this ledger that publishes a second lens in the box, and a two-lens goggle covers both bright days and dark ones without a second purchase. Check which second lens is included before you buy, because a spare storm lens is what you want and a spare mirror lens is not.

Two: buy a goggle built for fast lens changes

The OutdoorMaster PRO Magnetic publishes a magnetic lens change, which is workable in gloves. That matters specifically for night skiing at a resort that runs a twilight session, because the swap happens in a cold parking lot or a lodge doorway rather than at a workbench. The catch is published on the product page: one lens is included, so the two-lens setup is a second purchase and the real cost is higher than the sticker. The lens-swap roundup compares the systems.

Three: own one mid-VLT lens and accept the compromise

For a family who skis a handful of days a year and might do one night session, buying two lens systems is not proportionate. A single mid-range lens is the honest compromise, and the published figure to look for is somewhere in the thirties to forties. The Smith Rascal publishes exactly this at 36% VLT, which is why it is the youth goggle recommended for a child who will only ever own one lens. It is not ideal at night, but it is far better than a dark lens and vastly better than nothing.

Fogging is worse at night, for a specific reason

Night sessions are short, cold, and interrupted. People stand in a warm lodge for twenty minutes, then go straight out into cold air, and a warm humid inner lens meeting cold outside air is exactly the condition that fogs. The behavior that causes it is also more likely at night: pushing goggles up onto the helmet while talking, then pulling them back down over a face that has been breathing into a neck gaiter.

Everything on the anti-fog page applies, but three habits matter most here. Do not park wet goggles on your forehead. Keep the gaiter below the goggle rather than tucked under it, because your breath is the humidity source. And if a lens does fog, let it clear in moving cold air rather than wiping the inside, since wiping the inner surface is how the anti-fog treatment gets destroyed.

If you wear glasses

Night skiing is the session where an over-the-glasses frame earns its bulk. Contact lenses in dry cold air at night are less comfortable than the same contacts at midday, and swapping to glasses at 6pm in a parking lot is a normal thing to want to do. The Bolle Y7 OTG publishes a frame depth built for glasses to sit inside rather than a normal goggle labeled OTG, and the goggles-for-glasses roundup covers the rest of the field.

The rest of the night kit

• One more layer than you think. A floodlit session is usually two to three hours after the temperature has dropped, and you are riding lifts more than you are working. The base layer page is the place to add it.
• Face cover. Cold air on cheeks at speed after dark is the complaint people come back with. Face protection options are here, and the fit against a goggle matters.
• A helmet, still. Nothing about reduced light makes a helmet less relevant, and floodlit runs concentrate everyone onto fewer pistes.
• Warm hands. Standing on a lift in the dark is where cold hands begin. The cold hands page is unusually practical about what actually works.

Night skiing is also the cheapest lift ticket most resorts sell, which makes it the sensible place for a beginner family to get a second or third day of practice without a second full-price ticket. That is worth factoring into the cost arithmetic: more days on snow moves the rent-or-buy line.