Swim goggles for open water - Recommendations

Swimming in open water leaves you with other requirements for the swim goggles than the ones you use indoors. Apart from the comfort and fit being in focus, the colour of the lenses is also very important for the experience. When swimming in open water, the sun can be shining directly on you, the weather can be cloudy, or somewhere in between.

You should think about this when you pick your swim goggles for open water.

As a rule of thumb, we recommend the following when it comes to coloured lenses for open water swimming

• Mirror: Reduces light-input + glare.

• Smoke: Powerful reduction in glare, but still a slight colour distortion. 

• Clear: Only on cloudy days, but provides vision with no change of colour. Not recommended on sunny days.

• Blue: Both for indoor and outdoor use. However, only on cloudy days outdoors, since it doesn’t filter out direct sunlight.

• Polarized: Made specifically for open water. No matter the weather or sun conditions. Filters away intense glare from reflected light from the flat surfaces on the water.

No matter what, the focus is typically not on the water resistance, because it’s no use if you can’t see.

There is another special condition in swimming in open water - especially if you are swimming competitively. And this is the risk of getting kicked right in the face. To avoid that this leads to water inside the swim goggles, the goggle should be pretty resilient and have a nice fit to the face. 

This can be achieved with the perfect fit on the eye cup so they actually suck themselves to your face. However, many are also using actual swim masks, who with their large silicone-skirt secures a larger surface, where the mask can suck itself to your face.

These recommendations can also be used for tri-swimming competitions.