TESTED: Adidas Evil Eye Evo
The Adidas Eyewear Evil Eye Evo is the love child of your favourite glasses and goggles.
Photos by Tim Arch and Wil Barrett.
First established back in 2000, Adidas Eyewear has evolved to be a popular choice with extreme sportspeople the world over. In Australia, sponsorship of prominent mountain bikers such as Paul van der Ploeg and Jessica Douglas means we’re very used to seeing Adidas Eyewear through the pages of AMB.
Having reportedly taken 2 years to develop, the new Evil Eye Evo glasses are brand new from Adidas. They’re equipped with a whole host of technical features to make them suitable for the harshest conditions you could possibly face in the outdoors. Apparently Adidas built the Evil Eye Evo’s to woo Enduro racers back from using goggles. As such, they feature a close fitting design, an enormous field of vision, and a removable foam sweat bar.
The Evil Eye Evo’s are available in two frame sizes, and there are 22 different lens tints to choose from, including anti-fog and hydrophobic lenses. They also feature a Quick-Change lens system that allows you to sub in different lenses, which are available separately from $90.
The model I’ve been testing is the Evil Eye Evo Pro, which includes the integrated foam sweat bar and a special hydrophobic lens coating.
Wide Field Of Vision
The first thing you notice with the Evil Eye Evo is just how enormous they are physically. The coverage is awesome. Like other Adidas sports glasses, the Evil Eye Evo Pro feature a 10-base extreme lens curve that wraps around your face further than anything we’ve ever used before. Despite the heavy curvature, Adidas have worked hard to keep the lens free of distortion.
The rubber nose pads feature a dual position adjustment to modify where the frame sits on your nose, and inverting these nose pads provides two additional width positions. From there you can also tweak the Tri Fit arms, which can be locked into 3 different angular positions. This adjustment changes the tilt of how the glasses sit against your face, and is useful for eliminating interference from bushy eyebrows or big cheeks.
Along with the foam sweat bar, the Evil Eye Evo’s do sit very close to your face, keeping any bugs or flying debris away from your precious pupils. I initially found the sweat bar to be a little noticeable on my eyebrows when first trying the glasses on, but within 2 minutes of riding, I’d completely forgotten about it. For me, it’s a brilliant feature that reduces the amount of sweat that rolls down into your eyes while riding. And if you use sunscreen like I do, you’ll know just how much of a stinging pain that can be.
Cool Lenses
Despite their snug fit, the glasses ventilate exceptionally well thanks to the Climacool system that creates a vacuum behind the lens whilst riding. Air is drawn up through vents inside the lower frame, and is sucked out at the rear of the lens through exhaust ports, while heat and moisture rises up into the sweatband. It’s a clever design that legitimately works, though only while riding. When stationary, it doesn’t take long for the close-fitting glasses to fog up.
I tested two different versions of the Evil Eye Evo glasses, one with the Blue Mirror finish lens, and the other with the LST Active tint.
The Blue Mirror lens features a hydrophobic coating help shed dirt and moisture and offers impressive glare reduction for UV protection in bright summery conditions. Unfortunately I did experience a handful of scratches on the lens throughout testing. According to Adidas, the mirror-finish lenses can be more susceptible to scratch damage due to the way the lens surface is layered up. And because of that enormous 10-base curve, the lenses do stick bluge out from the frame more than conventional glasses, so they’re more vulnerable in the event of a tumble.
The LST Active lens on the other hand proved to be much more durable, and is Adidas’ most popular option for mountain bikers. It still provides about 85% light absorption for use in bright conditions, but I found the tint to be more balanced for the green and brown colours I experienced on singletrack.
While the LST Active lens gets my pick, because of the Quick Change lens system that employs a simple slide lock at each end of the frame, it’s easy to change out lenses for varying conditions.
Bottom Line
As I’ve come to expect from Adidas Eyewear, the Evil Eye Evo glasses are phenomenally comfortable. They’re not cheap, but if you’re looking to shave some dollars, Adidas offer the standard Evil Eye Evo glasses without the integrated sweat bar from $250 depending on your lens choice.
Either way, they’re highly adjustable and well suited to fast paced XC racing and aggressive trail riding. The huge field of vision might seem overkill at first, but it doesn’t take long to appreciate just how beneficial that is on the trail, and especially if you love riding at warp speed.
Not only have Adidas challenged the goggle-lovers, in my opinion, the Evil Eye Evo’s have reset the bar for all other glasses too.
RRP: $295 (LST Active Lens) to $315 (Blue Mirror Lens)
