For anyone who wears eyeglasses, fogged lenses can be a source of frustration. For the scuba diver or winter sports enthusiast, they can be a serious safety issue. And for the soldier, fire fighter, or first responder, lens fog can be a matter of life and death. In fact, I can’t think of a single situation, aside from a throwaway gag in a 1980s comedy, in which fogged-up glasses or goggles are ever desirable .
But how to combat lens fog? There’s the old spit and rub technique, but that usually has modest efficacy and requires saliva to be mere millimeters from your eyes. There are pricey anti-fog lenses that come pre-treated, but they won’t help your existing eyewear. You could simply wipe your glasses, goggles, or mask every time the surface fogs up, but that’s not ideal when you’re skiing down a double black diamond slope, a couple hundred feet under water, or engaged in active combat.
The best idea is to apply a few spritzes of Sven Can See anti-fog gel to your lenses, smear the stuff all over the glasses/goggles/mask, and then enjoy eight hours or more of anti-fog protection.
Allow me to share my personal experience with the brand. I attended an Outdoor Retailer event in New York City. I’d never heard of Sven Can See, which launched in 2015, and I can’t say I had ever given any thought to anti-fog products, annoying as lens fog can certainly be.
Sven Can See had a booth set up rather near the entrance; as I stood nearby, studying a display laden with hiking boots, a gentleman caught my ear and asked if he could introduce me to the brand. It turned out to be Scott Newman, the president of the company (which was named for a fictional character from a story he would tell his daughter) who had developed the solution after enduring the frustration of fogged-up eyewear during winter hikes in northern Maine.
Newman explained how the formula is made from natural ingredients and is 100 percent safe for regular use. It’s largely coconut-derived, I recall him saying, though the actual formula is kept secret. The ingredients list only “biodegradable surfactants”.
One application of Sven Can See usually lasts at least eight hours. For extreme wintry conditions, they also make an Anti-Fog/Frost Xtreme Cold Spray, and, for dirty lenses, they offer a lens cleaner. (Clean lenses subsequently treated with anti-fog spray resist fogging better, see?)
Thus far I’ve primarily used Sven Can See on the sunglasses I wear while running or hiking, and no fog yet, baby. As the temperature drops, I’ll continue applying it to my glasses and will ideally hit the slopes.
