Ski Sunglasses

There is a part of a ski day that a goggle is the wrong tool for, and most skiers meet it the first time they walk uphill. Climbing, you make heat and moisture faster than a sealed goggle can shed it, and open sides stop being a weakness and become the point. The same is true standing still in the sun, sitting outside at lunch, driving to the hill, and skiing the flat in spring when it is warm and dry and nothing is falling out of the sky.

Sunglasses also go in a pocket. A goggle plus a second lens is a thing you carry in a bag or wear on your helmet, while a shield folds flat and weighs a fraction of it, which is why touring skiers and cross-country skiers so often have both and reach for the sunglasses on the way up.

Tempo is the sport frame in the Corlin range, and it is a shield: one continuous lens across the face rather than two lenses in a rim, curved to follow facial contours. The frame is lightweight, the nose bridge is rubber and adjustable, the C logo sits on the temple, and each pair arrives in a hard case with a carton box. Corlin describes it as built to withstand more demanding weather conditions.

Three colorways at one price of 499 SEK: black frame with a black lens, black frame with a blue tint, white frame with a brown tint. The shape, the size and the fittings are identical across all three, so the choice between them is a choice of look and of how dark you want the world.

Snow is a reflector, and altitude adds to what it reflects, so the light you are dealing with above the treeline on a clear day is stronger than anything a city summer produces. The measure for it is the lens category in EN ISO 12312-1:2022, a scale from 0 to 4 that says how much visible light a lens lets through. Category 3 is the bright-sun band and the one fitted to every Corlin goggle; Category 1 is for flat light and falling snow.

Corlin publishes a category and a UV400 rating for every goggle lens in the range. For the Tempo lens it publishes neither, so we will not put a number on it here. If a stated category or a stated UV rating is part of your decision, and high on a clear day it reasonably is, the goggle lens is the side of the range where Corlin states them, and the lens guide sets out which is which.

Uphill is the clearest case. Skinning or hiking, you want air moving across your face and nothing sealed against it, and you want the eyewear you are not using to disappear into a pocket. Cross-country is the same argument for a whole day, because the speeds are lower and the effort never stops.

Spring is the second case. Slush, sun and a terrace at lunch is sunglasses weather, and by then most people are skiing the middle of the day rather than first lift to last. The shield shape reads as sport rather than as town, which is the reason people keep them on for the drive home as well.

Then there is everything around the skiing: the lift queue in April, the walk to dinner, the flight, the summer after. At 499 SEK the Tempo is not asking to be your only pair of eyewear for the mountain, and that is what makes it easy to have along.

Straight, because it is the useful part. An open frame will not keep cold air off your eyes at speed, will not keep snow off the surface in front of them, and will not save a day of flat light: a dark tint is the wrong answer when the surface has already lost its shape, and there is no lighter lens to swap to on a sunglass. Night skiing under floodlights is out of the question in any tint.

None of that makes the Tempo a bad frame. It makes it a frame for one half of the weather. The other half is covered by two goggles and nineteen magnetic lenses that change in seconds with gloves on, and the honest advice is to read the buying guide before deciding that sunglasses are the whole answer.