Hello Yellow!
Ok, admit it – one of the minor but still important reasons we like to ride motorbikes is that we look just so damn cool. Motorcycling is possibly the only publicly-admissible reason for wearing an awful lot of black leather. And when you’re cruising down some urban boulevard on your cafe racer, or stopped at a bustling city junction, what completes the look better than a pair of extra dark Ray-Bans or some funkadelic multicolour mirror shades?
Out on the road in the wilds of Scotland, there aren’t so many shop windows in which to admire your cosmically hip reflection, or idle bystanders just desperate to be impressed by your bikerly style. With nobody looking, here at Clover Central we’ve stolen an idea from our adjacent two-wheeled tribe – (whisper it) the road cyclists. These guys seem to have a thing for yellow-tinted riding glasses, and we’ve given these tawny lenses a trial on real bikes.
While we’re slighly missing our previous Matrix-esque dark glasses vibe, we have to admit that the cyclists are onto something. As well as turning everything a relentlessly cheerful colour, and making green landscapes in particular really “pop”, our yellowy-orange lenses do seem to tune things up on the visibility front. Everything seems a bit more “contrasty”, providing a sense of enhanced clarity and sharpness. Are we imagining it? Maybe not – there seems to be some science behind the yellow lens concept.
So, at the expense of our previous maximum coolness, we’re planning to stick with the yellow lens look. We figure they’ll help us spot lurking pheasants and SMIDSYs before they inevitably fail to spot us.
Since MAMILs are a target niche for purveyors of such eyewear, we’re sure you can pay stupid amounts for sporty yellow shades. (I mean, you can spend £150 on a WATER BOTTLE HOLDER for a bicycle – and that’s not including the water bottle – WTF guys?!) Since we’re canny motorcyclists, we got our glasses for a tenner from the excellent folk at Scottish outdoor gear provider Lomo (who also do extremely affordable waterproof bags and soft panniers).
So, we’d say, give the yellow a go! And if we spot you stopping a couple of miles before a scheduled Cloverleaf coffee stop to switch into your pitch-black Ray-Bans, we won’t tell anybody.
