HOW TO CHOOSE... Swimming Goggles

When buying your first pair of goggles or looking for a new style, the range of options can be overwhelming. This guide will help make the choice easier by identifying the right lens colour, shape and fit for you.

Lens Colour

Goggles are available in a range of lens colours to suit the conditions in which you swim. Clear Lenses offer the clearest vision and are most suitable for indoor or night swimming. For outdoor swimming in bright conditions, we recommend Smoke/Tinted Lenses to cut out brightness, or Mirrored/Polarised Lenses to reduce glare as well as brightness. Coloured/Rainbow finishes on Mirrored Lenses are just for appearances and don’t affect their function. Blue Lenses strike a balance between glare reduction and clarity of vision, so they are suitable for indoor and outdoor use.

When browsing our range of goggles, we recommend filtering the results by your preferred lens colour to eliminate irrelevant results.

Shape

The shape of your goggles can make a big difference to your comfort, especially on longer swims. If you have a smaller than average face (more common for women), you’ll be more comfortable in goggles designed for your face shape. Aqua Sphere offers Small Frame versions of many of their models for this reason.

The shape of the lens comes down to two essential features: range of vision and drag minimisation. For open water or casual swimming, swimming masks like the Aqua Sphere Seal provide a wide range of vision and position the pressure of the goggles over a greater area, great for those who find regular goggles uncomfortable to wear.

For racing and competition, you can reduce drag with a low-profile goggle like the Orca Killa Speed. Most of our goggles fall somewhere between these extremes, offering a mix of comfort, speed and range of vision to suit your individual needs.

Fit

A well-fitting pair of goggles should sit on the face without digging in painfully, and should give a short sensation of suction when pulled off the face. Too much suction and the goggles will become uncomfortable, but too little and they will leak. If you can’t get suction on the edges close to your temples, try shortening the nose piece, or try a smaller frame. If the frame digs into your nose or sits too close to your eyes on one side, you may need to lengthen the nose piece or try a larger frame.

It may seem like an odd tip, but when purchasing low-profile race goggles, make sure to blink a few times and check your eyelashes don’t hit against the lenses, as this may become annoying in the longer term.

The strap around your head should not be the only thing holding your goggles in place, if the frames don’t form a seal to your face without the strap, the goggles may leak. You’ll also be tempted to over-tighten the strap, which will shorten the strap’s lifespan and can cause bruising and rings around your eyes. If you find your goggles shift when you race or turn quickly, look for goggles with a split strap for more security.