The best ski mittens, and why you cannot shop them on warmth

Why you cannot rank mittens on warmth

This is the honest starting point, and it is the reason this page is organized the way it is. We read the published specifications for every mitten here, and one of six publishes an insulation weight. The rest name the insulation - Megaloft, ThermacoreECO, PrimaLoft Gold Cross Core - and stop there.

A name is not a quantity. Two mittens can both say Megaloft and have twice the fill of one another, and nothing on either page would tell you. So when a listing says a mitten is warm, or warmer, or heavily insulated, there is usually no figure underneath it that you could hold the maker to. That is not a conspiracy; gloves and mittens have simply never been sold on a spec sheet the way skis and helmets are. But it means the comparison most people try to make - which of these is warmest - cannot be answered from published data, and anyone who answers it confidently is guessing.

The same is true of waterproofing, in a different way. Not one mitten here publishes a hydrostatic rating in millimeters. Jackets and pants publish that number routinely - what the millimeter rating actually measures is worth reading if you have shopped a shell. Handwear does not. Some makers put a membrane in and name it; some put a membrane in and certify it with a third party; some say waterproof and name nothing at all.

Certified, named, or nothing: the only spec you can really check

Gore-Tex is the one membrane in handwear that is not simply the brand vouching for itself. It is a licensed material with a third-party guarantee attached, which is a meaningfully different claim from a brand coining a name for its own insert. That does not make a proprietary insert bad - DryVent and DRYRIDE and BD.dry are all real membranes doing real work - but it does mean the Gore-Tex rows are the only ones where the waterproof claim is backed by somebody other than the seller.

Read that table as a ladder of how much of the claim you have to take on trust, not as a ranking of how dry your hands will be on a given day. A well-made proprietary membrane will keep a once-a-year skier dry through a week of ordinary conditions. The difference shows up at the bottom of the table, where there is no membrane named at all and therefore nothing to compare.

The liner question, which matters more than it sounds

Only one mitten here publishes a removable liner. That sounds like a detail and it is the single most practical difference on the page.

A mitten gets wet from the inside as much as the outside, because a hand inside a sealed insulated shell sweats and the moisture has nowhere fast to go. With a fixed lining your only option is to leave the whole mitten somewhere warm and hope. With a removable liner you pull the liner out, hang it separately, and both halves dry in a fraction of the time - which is the same principle behind pulling boot liners out at the end of the day. On a one-day trip this does not matter. On a five-day trip in a condo with no drying room, it is the difference between starting day three in a dry mitten and starting it in a cold damp one. How to dry ski gear overnight without a boot dryer covers the rest of the kit.

The picks

Gordini GTX Storm Mitt

The pick, on the one criterion in this category that is checkable by somebody other than the seller. GTX is Gore-Tex, and Gordini publishes the mitt under Gore-Tex with Megaloft insulation and a Heatrap lining behind it, across 5 published sizes from S to XXL - the widest size range on this page. The published list price is $82.99, which puts it in the middle of the group rather than at the top.

What you are buying is the removal of one unknown. On every other adult mitten here except the OutdoorMaster, the question "will this actually keep water out" is answered by the brand that wants your money. On this one it is answered by a licensed third-party membrane. For a reader who skis a handful of days a year and does not want to become an expert in membrane marketing, that is the shortest path to a mitten that works.

Honest cons: Gordini publishes no insulation weight, so you cannot compare its warmth to the North Face row below even though that is the comparison you want to make. There is no waterproof rating in millimeters, because Gore-Tex is sold as a guarantee rather than a number. And there is no warranty term on the product page.

Black Diamond Mercury Mitt

The expensive one, and the only one whose liner comes out. Black Diamond publishes a BD.dry waterproof insert, a removable insulated liner filled with PrimaLoft Gold Cross Core, a four-way stretch shell, a long gauntlet cuff, and a goat leather palm with an additional reinforcement layer. The published list price is $149.95.

Two of those specifications earn the price. The removable liner is the drying advantage described above. The goat leather palm is the durability one: a leather palm with a reinforcement layer is built for repeated handling of ropes, poles and rock, and it is the part of a mitten that fails first on anybody who uses their hands. PrimaLoft Gold Cross Core is also published as insulating when wet, which is the property that matters most on the day the mitten has already lost the argument.

Honest cons: it is nearly three times the price of the Burton. BD.dry is Black Diamond’s own insert rather than a certified membrane, so on the criterion at the top of this page it ranks below a cheaper Gordini. There is no published insulation weight and no millimeter rating. And no warranty term appears on the product page.

The North Face Montana Ski Mitt

The only mitten on this page that publishes an insulation weight, and it publishes three of them: 250 g Heatseeker on the back of the hand, 160 g in the palm, 80 g in the gauntlet. Zoned figures like that tell you something real - the back of your hand faces the wind and gets the most fill, the palm is pressed against a warm pole grip and gets less, the gauntlet is over a jacket sleeve and gets least.

That is the most useful set of numbers in the category, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not let you do. It lets you compare this mitten against other North Face handwear, and against any jacket or glove that publishes a Heatseeker figure. It does not let you compare it against the Gordini or the Black Diamond, because they publish nothing to compare it to. One maker publishing a number does not create a scale.

The retailer spec sheet also publishes a limited lifetime warranty, a faux-leather palm overlay, a WindWall gauntlet and touchscreen compatibility - which is unusual, because working a phone is normally the thing you give up when you choose mittens.

Honest cons: DryVent is The North Face’s own insert rather than a certified membrane. There is no millimeter rating. And The North Face publishes no MSRP on a page we could read, so the street price is the only price there is.

Gordini Junior Gore-Tex Mitt

The children’s pick, and a genuinely unusual product: a certified membrane in a junior mitten at a published $60.99. Gordini publishes Gore-Tex, Megaloft insulation and a moisture-wicking lining across 5 junior sizes, XS through XL.

The reason to spend this on a child is not the standard of their skiing. It is that a child puts their hands directly into snow, on purpose, repeatedly, for the entire day - building things, throwing things, falling over - and then gets back on a lift with wet hands and no way to warm them. Cold wet hands end more family ski days than cold anything else, which is the argument made at length in why your hands get cold and what actually fixes it.

Honest cons: sixty dollars is a lot for an item a growing child will outgrow in two seasons, and there is a real case for buying two cheap pairs instead of one good pair so there is always a dry set. No insulation weight is published, and no warranty term appears on the product page.

Burton Profile Mitten

The best warranty per dollar here by a wide margin. The published list price is $52.95 - the cheapest named-membrane mitten on the page - and the retailer spec sheet publishes a limited lifetime warranty with it, along with a DRYRIDE 2-layer shell and DRYRIDE Membrane 2.0, a PFC-free water-repellent finish, an extended gauntlet cuff, a removable wrist leash, and Screen Grab touchscreen panels on the thumb and palm.

There is a neat detail worth pointing out: Burton prices the Profile mitten at the same $52.95 as the Profile glove, which means the warmer of the two formats costs nothing extra. If you have already decided mittens are right for you - and the gloves-versus-mittens argument comes down to one sentence - there is no price penalty for acting on it.

Honest cons: DRYRIDE is Burton’s own membrane rather than a certified one. The brushed-microfiber lining is fixed, so there is nothing to pull out and dry. The palm is PU synthetic rather than leather. And as with everything else here, no insulation weight and no millimeter rating are published.

OutdoorMaster Ski Mittens

Marked as the skip above, and the reason is narrow rather than damning. It is roughly a third of the price of anything else on this page, it carries a published two-year warranty, and it is a real ski mitten rather than a knitted one. For a single dry-cold family trip it will get you through the day.

What it does not have is anything to check. No membrane is named, no waterproof rating is published, and no insulation weight is published, so every claim on the listing is the brand’s own word with nothing behind it. On a page built entirely on what makers publish, that puts it last. Buy it as the spare pair that lives in the car - which, per the next section, is advice worth taking seriously for any mitten.

The second pair matters more than the first

This is the recommendation we would make before any of the picks above. One good pair of mittens and one cheap pair beats one excellent pair, for a simple reason: a wet mitten cannot be dried on a mountain, and there is no specification that changes that. The second pair is what turns a soaked morning into a dry afternoon.

• For a family. One decent pair each plus one cheap spare per child. Children soak mittens first and fastest.
• For one adult, a few days a year. One certified-membrane pair and keep your old gloves in the car. The gloves are your spare.
• For a multi-day trip with no drying room. The removable-liner mitten, or two pairs. Those are the only two answers that work.

If your hands run cold regardless of what you put on them, the fix is usually not more insulation. Disposable warmers inside the mitten add heat rather than retaining it, and battery-heated mittens and gloves compare on published run time, which is one of the few numbers handwear does publish.

Sizing, cuffs and the two things that go wrong

Mittens fail in fit in two specific ways, and both are avoidable.

Too tight is colder. A mitten works by letting your fingers share a single air space and warm each other. Pack that space tight and you have removed the insulation and the mechanism at once. If you are between sizes in a mitten, size up - the opposite of the advice for a glove, where a loose finger is a cold finger. How to measure a hand and read the published charts has the method.

The cuff has to agree with your jacket. A long gauntlet cuff goes over the jacket sleeve and seals with a cinch; a short undercuff goes inside it. Either works and mixing them does not: a gauntlet under a tight jacket cuff bunches, and an undercuff over a loose sleeve lets snow straight in. Four of the mittens here publish a gauntlet or extended cuff, which is the safer default for a beginner because it works with almost any jacket.

One more thing nobody mentions until it has happened: wash them the way the maker says, and re-treat the shell when water stops beading. Washing and re-waterproofing gloves and mittens is twenty minutes a season and it is the difference between a membrane that lasts five years and one that lasts two.

The bottom line

If you want the fewest unknowns, buy the Gordini GTX Storm Mitt - the waterproof claim is the only one on this page certified by somebody other than the brand selling it. If you are going away for a week with nowhere to dry anything, buy the Black Diamond Mercury Mitt for the liner that comes out. If you want an actual number to compare, the North Face Montana is the only mitten here that gives you one. If the budget is tight, the Burton Profile Mitten brings a published lifetime warranty to the cheapest named membrane in the group. And for a child, pay for the Gordini Junior membrane or buy two cheap pairs - but do not buy one cheap pair and expect it to last the week.

Whatever you choose, the mitten is the warmer format and it is not close. Our glove picks are here if you need your fingers, and handwear sits firmly in the buy column of the buy-versus-rent arithmetic - nobody rents mittens, and you would not want the pair they handed you.