What are the best safety glasses? The short answer: Any pair that you or your workers will actually wear. First, a riddle: why don’t starfish wear sunglasses? Aside from any personal reasons, starfish don’t have eyes. Yes, that's the end of the joke. Worker's eyes are fragile and unlike hair, fingernails, or skin, cannot be regrown. At least not yet. Until then, proper eye safety is critical for everyone working with power tools, or working in an industrial capacity.
Until modern science figures out a way to give humans this ability, safety glasses protect these irreplaceable parts with style and function. ForceFlex, Pyramex, and safety goggles have a wide range of cool styles that look nothing like the traditional, big and clunky hard plastic safety glasses of yesteryear.
They are also much safer. Forceflex makes a bunch of models like the FF120 that can withstand impacts of a thousand feet per second – that’s military level toughness! The ultra-light Venture II model by Pyramex provides 180 degrees of protection without the distraction of heavy plastic frames. Ultimately, the best safety glasses are those that you can see yourself wearing on a daily basis.
Personally, I don’t leave the house without my Carhartt Carthage glasses. I sport these for work and play. i find doubling my wear-time cuts my chance of losing them in half. With neoprene detailing, the glasses stay put. Built-in ventilation keeps the scratchproof lenses from fogging. Unbreakable nylon frames guarantee their survival of face plants on the job or at the beach. Eyewear tends to scamper off and hide when it is not being worn. Several of my more absent-minded friends swear by the Goliath model by Pyramex because despite its low price it retains its coolness factor. So if the black hole of your pickup, tackle box, or site office swallows them up, then a replacement won’t kill your cash flow.