React Sunglasses

Solar-Powered at the Speed of Light

React sunglasses feature built-in solar cells that convert infrared light into electrical impulses, which flow through to a liquid crystal display, causing the lenses to lighten or darken, and shift tints in a flash. How fast React sunglasses do that throws shade over everything else. The lenses in React glasses darken 300 times faster than conventional photochromic lenses and lighten 1200 times faster.

There’s a second, quieter advantage in that. Photochromic lenses are triggered by UV light, which is why they sulk behind a car windscreen and why they take a good half-minute to catch up with the world. React reads infrared instead, so the lenses work the same whether you’re out in the open, under glass, or dropping into shade — sliding between filter categories S2, S3 and S4 with no lag you’ll ever notice. Polarisation and UV400 filtering are constant throughout, whatever tint the lens has settled on.

From the Welding Bench to the Bike

React’s technology emerged from innovations created by its Swiss parent company, Optrel Sports, which manufactures, among other things, top-tier welding masks and goggles — an industry at the extreme end of precision, clarity, and potentially, blinding brightness, attributes familiar to a cyclist’s life under the sun. Optrel pioneered the auto-darkening welding helmet back in 1986 and has spent the four decades since becoming one of the world’s leading names in face, head and respiratory protection. In 2022 the family-run company decided its liquid-crystal know-how belonged outdoors as well, and founded react. The glasses are still made in Switzerland, at Wattwil in the country’s north-east.

Optray or Rev?

Two silhouettes, one technology. The Optray is the lighter of the pair at 36 grams — semi-rimless, so there’s nothing sitting in the lower half of your field of view, in a single size that suits most faces. It’s the pick if you want as little in the way as possible. The Rev is the fuller-framed option at 40 grams, and it’s the one to choose if fit is the thing you fuss over: the temples adjust individually and twist through 360 degrees at the tips, the nose pads set to two positions, and the frame tilts through three angles relative to the lenses. It also comes in a Small for narrower faces. Reaction speed, tint range, polarisation and UV protection are identical across both — the choice is coverage and adjustability against outright minimalism.

Why React Makes Sense in Arizona

Desert riding is a study in violent light. You roll out into a soft morning sun and inside an hour you’re squinting into a hard one. You climb out of the shade of a wash into full glare, drop into a canyon and lose two stops in a second, then ride home into a low sun that sits exactly where you want to be looking. Conventional lenses ask you to pick one tint and live with it, or carry a second pair and stop to swap. React simply keeps up, anywhere from morning sun to full sun. Worth being straight about the other end: the lenses never sit lighter than category 2 — a proper medium tint — so they’re not glasses for riding in the dark. But the brightest part of an Arizona afternoon is handled without you touching a thing.

If You Ride in Prescription Glasses

React makes a correction clip that mounts behind the lenses of either model, with the prescription lenses made up by your own optician. We can order clips in alongside a pair of glasses, along with replacement nose pieces in the various colours and the softer flex version — just ask us when you order.