Blog

Y&Y Belay Glasses

• March 2015
• Climb Gear Reviews Uncategorized

I am a real convert to belay glasses, and Y&Y sent me this pair of Bordeaux Red Colorful Belay Glasses to test out.

If you have not started using belay glasses, you should get some immediately if not sooner!! They’re simple to use, they save your neck, and they make it possible to watch your climber like a hawk, which is much safer and more polite.

The Y&Y glasses have some wonderful features. They’re very light, which is of major importance for me. I don’t like the feeling of heavy glasses pushing on my nose or sliding, and so belay glasses need to be as light as possible 🙂 They are also fairly sturdy despite the light weight, and they come with a zippered hard case that clips to your harness. My other pair of belay glasses has a nice plastic case, which I’m always misplacing on the ground or in a pack and not finding when I want it, so being able to clip the protective case to your harness loop whilst belaying is a small but very helpful feature.

The glass prisms on these glasses are also exceptionally clear, so the optics are very good. If you’re like me, there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll read directions. The glasses cord should be either girthed or twisted securely when attaching it to the arms, and it’s not intuitive (usually we expect to just slide the rubber loops on, which does hold but not securely). I recommend taking a look at the directions and securing it as recommended so the rubber loops don’t pop off.

I especially love the fact that these glasses come in different colors. I was a little torn between the purple and the red, and decided to go for red. Although the blue looked super pretty too…. As is often the case with metallic colors which are very affected by light especially in photos, the red turned out not to look quite like what I expected from the photos–in bright light it’s almost a dark coppery-type red color more than a wine-red, and in darker light it’s a very dark color. I bet the purple would have been lovely, and next time I would definitely go for that color. If exact shade of color is super important to you (I can’t be the only one who’s this picky about colors, can I?!), keep in mind that it’s hard to photograph colors on this type of material, and pictures will have a hard time showing how the colors really look.

Big thumbs up for these wonderful belay glasses which are available both at the Y&Y site and on Amazon.