Anti-fog coatings are a critical part of keeping your safety glasses safe.  Foggy lenses are something that most glasses-wearers have felt with in the last year during the COVID-19 pandemic.  People who have always needed PPE for their jobs have been dealing with this issue for a long time.  Fogging of eyewear is a huge inconvenience and safety risk to the wearer.  In fact, fogging of lenses is one of the number one reasons that workers remove or do not wear their safety eyewear.  Luckily, there are options that can be purchased for both standard and prescription safety glasses to mitigate this problem.

What causes fogging?

Water vapor condensed into fine droplets and collected on the lens.  This typically occurs as the lens is cooler than the air around it.  Causes for fogging to happen include: Humidity, Temperature change, Body Heat, or face coverings such as a face mask.  As wearing a face mask tends to cause our warm breath to go up into our orbital cavity and the lenses to fog up.

So how do anti-fog coatings work?

The coatings work by manipulating the moisture on the surface of the lens through lens-coating agents.  There are several types of products available for this purpose, but they fall into two different categories.  The coatings are either hydrophobic meaning ‘water fearing’ these coatings repellants water causing it to run off the lens.  OR Hydrophilic meaning ‘water loving’ this type of coating absorbed water into the coating.

The coatings are added onto the lenses in various ways, though mostly through a dip and flow process.

Any Safety Officer can explain the potential problems that occur due to lens fogging.  As previously mentioned as one of the top reasons for removing safety eyewear.  So what do we do?  As the consequences of not wearing the correct protection can be both financial and physically damaging to the worker and company.  We choose eye protection that is suitable for the job required and then make sure it has an anti-fog coating.

By doing this we are providing our staff the best opportunity to stay safe and cover our business against any claims.