For a sports enthusiast, summer can sometimes be a real pain in the ass. Not only does the sweltering heat challenge the body and mind of them hood shooters, the eye-piercing hot sun also challenge their eyes. With the ubiquitous ultraviolet rays and harmful glares, a pair of sunglasses is always deemed necessary. However, you don’t want a pair of burden on your face during your ball throwing or hood shooting sessions. Shades with incredibly heavy frames may protect your eyes perfectly from the sun, but they also cause you lose the game. Plastic frames excel in terms of lightness, yet are more fragile than their metal counterparts and thus are easier to break during the fierce physical contacts of sports. To get the ideal sunwear for sports during summer, you have to seek both lightness and sturdiness, namely the more lightweight choices in the metal category. Among those choices, titanium and magnesium sunglasses are without a doubt the most exciting and money-worthy ones out there on the market.
Titanium, a silver-gray metal that has been used for everything from the Gemini and Apollo space capsules to medical implants, is one of the most high end materials used in the glasses industry nowadays. With its incredibly high weight to strength ratio, titanium can be made in to exceptionally lightweight frames without compromising strength and durability. Besides, its also corrosion resistant and hypoallergnic which is another reason why it garnered such love among consumers and manufacturers alike. Despite of its flawless physical quality, however, titanium is not just used as pure metal in sunglasses frames. More often than not, manufacturers mix other metal with it to create alloys that combine the merits of all the components. Most famously, titanium is mixed with small amounts of vanadium and aluminum to produce the alloy we know as beta titanium. Due to the mixture of vanadium and aluminum, beta titanium sunglasses are much more flexible than pure titanium ones, hence more suitable to children and seniors. Another alloy that’s based on titanium is the memory metal. With 50% titanium and 50% nickel, memory metal is the most flexible of all. Memory metal titanium frames can be bent, twisted and distorted and then easily come back to their original shape. With this unique feature, memory metal titanium sunglasses have created huge craze among sports lovers and people who enjoy a active lifestyle in general.
With the constant and relentless craving and seeking for that material even lighter than the one before combined with the rapid development of technology and glasses making techniques, the eyewear industry has recently found magnesium. It is twice as light as titanium, getting the crown of the lightest material in eyewear territory. With that kind of weight, you probably think its fragile and doesn’t hold that much impact. Well, if you think that, you are seriously wrong. Not only is magnesium the lightest material in the world, it is also pretty strong and impact proof. With the right kind of mixture, magnesium alloys can be among the few that have the most strength and flexibility in the universe. That makes magnesium alloy sunglasses, mostly aluminum-magnesium alloy, the most loved and sought after shades for sports all over the world.
