Five Ways You're Scratching Your Sunglasses Without Knowing

Most scratched sunglasses are not ruined by a single drop. They are ruined slowly, by the things you do without thinking. The shirt wipe after a sweaty run. The tissue from the glovebox. The lenses set face-down on a nightstand. Each one feels too small to matter, and each is how a good pair goes hazy long before it should.

Quick answer: The habits that scratch your sunglasses are wiping lenses on your shirt, using paper towels or tissues, reaching for alcohol sprays or household cleaners, cleaning dry lenses, and storing them loose or lens-down. The fix is two tools and two minutes: rinse before you wipe, dry with a clean microfiber cloth, and park them in a hard case when they are off your face.

You're Wiping Your Lenses With Your Shirt

It is the reflex everyone shares: fog the lens, reach for your shirt hem, wipe. And it is the most common way lenses get scratched. Cotton fibres are abrasive, and your shirt has been collecting dust and pollen all day. When you drag it across the lens, you drag that grit with it.

Opticians do not soften this. A T-shirt on a lens is, in effect, sandpaper. The tiny fibres in the fabric can permanently scratch your lenses.

Swap the shirt for a clean microfiber cloth. It is the one tool built to lift particles off rather than grind them in.

You're Grabbing a Paper Towel or Tissue

A paper towel feels soft on your fingers, so it should be gentle on a lens. It is not. Paper towels, tissues, and napkins are wood pulp in essence, highly abrasive, and many generate dust that stays on the lens.

That warning comes from Re.'s own lens care guide, and it holds whether the paper is from a bathroom dispenser or a fresh box of tissues. If you are out with no cloth, rinse the lenses and let them air dry before you reach for paper.

You're Using Alcohol Sprays or Household Cleaners

The spray you bought to protect your lenses may be doing the opposite. Most commercial lens cleaning sprays rely on isopropyl alcohol (IPA), which can slowly degrade AR coatings, polarised films, and hydrophobic layers over time. One spray looks fine. Months of sprays leave haze, crazing, or a film that will not wipe off.

Then there is the household shelf. Vinegar, bleach, ammonia, and window or glass cleaners including Windex strip lens coatings, and their fumes can irritate the delicate tissues of your eyes. Hot water is on the same list: it can damage polarised and specialty lens coatings.

Lukewarm water and a drop of mild dish soap do the job without touching any of this.

You're Cleaning Dry Lenses

Here is the number most people never hear: the real enemy of a lens is quartz, and quartz has a Mohs hardness of 7. It is in sand, in dust, in the fibres of your clothes. When you wipe a dry lens, you drag those particles across the surface. You are not cleaning it. You are sanding it.

The rule is simple: if there might be sand on the lens, do not wipe it with any cloth until it has been rinsed first. Rinse first, wash gently, then dry with a clean microfiber cloth. Do that consistently and you dramatically reduce scratches.

A small consolation: on polycarbonate lenses, UV protection is built into the material itself, so a surface scratch cannot remove the UV-blocking properties. What you lose to a scratch is clarity, not coverage.

You're Storing Them Loose, Lens-Down, or in the Car

The damage is not only in how you clean, but where the glasses live. This is the part most people skip when they ask how to store sunglasses. Store them in a hard case whenever they are not being worn, and keep that case in one clean, dry spot so it becomes a habit.

The car is the worst shelf. High interior temperatures and direct sun can warp frames and damage lens coatings. Take them with you instead of leaving them on the dash.

A soft pouch helps against light dust and smudges, but not against crushing or heavy impacts. For a bag or travel, use a hard case, with the pouch as an extra layer inside. Proper storage comes down to four things: a hard case, cleaning them before you store them, avoiding extreme temperatures, and keeping them out of direct sunlight.

The Two-Minute Habit That Saves Your Lenses

None of this is complicated. Rinse first, wash gently, dry with a clean microfiber cloth. Park them in a hard case when they are off your face. The reason it is worth two minutes: even tiny scratches create glare, distort your vision, and compromise the effectiveness of your sunglasses.

Re. makes running sunglasses for exactly this kind of wear, and its lens care guide runs through the same rinse-first method in more detail. Two tools, two minutes, and the five habits above stop costing you a pair.