Should shooting glasses be polarized? Yes for glare with iron sights; no for red dots, clays and range displays

What a polarizer does

Light reflected off a flat surface — water, a hood, wet pavement — is largely polarized in one plane. A polarized lens contains a filter that blocks that plane, so the glare disappears while the scene stays. That is a real benefit when you are looking across a lake or driving into a low sun, which is why the feature migrated from fishing sunglasses into everything else. The filter has a second property: it also blocks polarized light coming from things you want to see.

Red dots, holographic sights and LCDs

Many reflex sights project their dot off a coated window, and the light that reaches your eye can be partly polarized. Tilt your head, or mount the gun at an angle, and a polarized lens can dim the dot toward invisible. LCD screens — a range's target-return display, a chronograph, a phone — emit polarized light outright, and at the wrong angle a polarized lens blanks them entirely. Neither effect is a defect; it is what the filter is for. It is simply the wrong tool for a line where you use optics and read screens.

Clays: nothing to gain

A clay target is not a flat reflective surface and an overcast sky is not a lake. A polarizer removes nothing that was in your way and takes some total light for the trouble; what makes an orange clay separate from green and gray is a contrast tint — vermillion, rose, amber — not a glare filter. The matrix is on best lens color for sporting clays.

When polarized helps

• Waterfowl and open water. Glare off the surface is the problem; iron sights or a bead do not care about the filter.
• Bright pavement or sand with open sights. Same logic.
• Driving to the range. Then swap. A kit makes that a ten-second job.

If you shoot with a red dot or a scope, or on a range with electronic target displays, the non-polarized version of the same tint gives you the color benefit without the risk. Every kit on this site's rankings is non-polarized unless the maker says otherwise; Revision sells polarized StingerHawk lenses as a separate kit, and retailers list polarized Magpul Defiant variants, which is why the Defiant review flags it.

Polarized and the rating

Polarization is a film or a lens property; the impact rating is the lens and frame as tested. A polarized lens from a rated maker's own kit carries the rating the maker states for that kit. A polarized sunglass with no standard on its page is a sunglass, whatever it costs. The check is on how to tell if glasses are ballistic rated.

Non-polarized picks