Smith Pivlock Arena glasses review

Our Smith Pivlock Arena glasses review: a neat pair of lightweight glasses that are comfortable on your face with some great lens technology

Cycling Weekly Verdict

Lightweight glasses with great lens coverage, but could perhaps do with a smidgen more protection against the wind.

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Lightweight

  • +

    Easy to swap lenses

  • +

    Lenses are very good

  • +

    Expansive lenses

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    Air can get through to eyes

  • -

You can trust Cycling Weekly. Our team of experts put in hard miles testing cycling tech and will always share honest, unbiased advice to help you choose. Find out more about how we test.

New for this year, the Smith Pivlock Arena glasses come with Smith’s own, also new, ChromaPop lens technology.

According to Smith, the new tech should stop our brains confusing blue and green and red and green colours, filtering light at two specific wavelengths, giving much greater definition.

The lense on the Smith Pivlock Arena

The Smith Pivlock Arenas have expansive lenses

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Whether or not my brain was less confused is a tough call, but the environment around me when riding was certainly defined, putting the lenses easily on a par with Oakley’s class-leading Prizm technology.

The lenses aren’t only clear, though, they’re also expansive, covering 99 per cent of your field of view. You really have to strain your eyes to the extreme to see any real daylight peeking in from the tops or sides, and even then it’s not distracting.

The low key design of the Smith Pivlock Arena Glasses

Low-key design with minimal frame

The Smith Pivlock Arena glasses are very low key in terms of construction – they only really have arms and a nose bridge – but what they do have they use smartly, especially when it comes to changing lenses.

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In this sense, they're the opposite to the Oakley Jawbreakers, but happily it is a design that makes them both lightweight and comfortable as well as well vented – they rarely got steamy at all.

This lightweight construction does possibly have it drawbacks, though. The fact there are no rubber edges to the frame, like on the Oakleys, can let air through, making your eyes water, especially if it’s cold.

Swapping lenses on the Smith Pivlock Arena glasses

Changing lenses is as simple as deconstructing the glasses

That said, my skinny face probably was a factor in the airflow issues. At least they didn’t move around when riding or looking down at my cycling computer.

Changing lenses means literally disassembling the glasses – but it’s not as hard as it sounds. In fact, it’s a total breeze to do and just involves separating the arms from the lenses and and removing the nose piece before reversing the system around the replacement lens.

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