Anti-Reflective Coatings
Anti-reflective coatings allow more light to filter through your lenses. Why in the world would you want that? Well, sunlight can oftentimes creep through the top and sides of your glasses, reflect off the backside your lenses, and right into your eyes. By adding an anti-reflective coating on the backside of your sunglasses, the sunlight travels through the lenses instead of bouncing into your eyes, thus saving you from that backside glare.For this reason, you usually don’t want the anti-reflective coating on the front side of sunglasses, but rather on the inside only. It also helps prevent you being able to see your own eye in the back of the lenses. That can be weird.On regular eyeglasses, the AR coating is applied to both the front and back of the lenses to help reduce glare and halos. While driving at night, this minimizes road glare and glare from headlights. And while indoors, it helps filter glare from florescent lights, TV screens, and computer monitors. Nowadays, it’s very common for people to get the coating on their everyday glasses. They also help your glasses look better on your face by reducing that white glare you often get on the lenses. This makes it easier for others to see your eyes behind those shiny glasses.
Anti-Reflective Coating vs. Polarized Lenses
Sometimes there is a little confusion about the difference between polarized lenses and lenses with an anti-reflective coating. The two are really quite different. Polarized lenses help reduce glare that bounces off of flat or shinny surfaces in bright and sunny conditions. For example, the kind of blinding glare off of water or the snow, or that annoying glare off the chrome bumper on the car in front of you. So to put it shortly, polarization cuts glare in bright, sunny conditions, while AR coatings are most useful indoors and at night, but also help make sunglasses more protective when applied on the back side. Can you double up and get both? Absolutely.
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