BSI has published a new Sunglasses standard BS EN ISO 12312-1:2022 on 30th September 2022. This standard is applicable to all afocal (plano power) sunglasses and clip-ons for general use, including road use and driving, and is intended for protection against solar radiation.
This New British standard has replaced the previous standard BS EN ISO 12312-1:2013+A1:2015. There are a few main changes made to the new sunglasses standard as stated below.
- Terms and Definitions: Some new definitions have been added to the new standard e.g. electro-optical sunglare filters and Reaction time.
- Headforms: Test methods that require Headfroms shall use Headform-1-M for adult and (1-C6) for Children’s sunglasses.
- Transmittance and Filter categories: The consumer labels/usage wording has changed in the new standard.
- Uniformity of Luminious Transmittance: This requirement has changed in the new standard. The diameter of circle around the reference point for uniformity is 30mm in the new standard while it was 40mm in the old standard. The tolerance for the difference in transmission between two points in a lens has increased to 15% in the new standard as compared to 10% in the old standard. This requirement has been relaxed a lot in the new standard. This is good news for manufacturers and suppliers of sunglasses as this was the main reason for the failures of sunglasses especially for gradient lenses. The Which? Magazine report which found that 15 out of 21 pairs of sunglasses failed British standards. Most of these failures were due to this requirement. The Which? Report can be found here //www.which.co.uk/news/article/high-street-sunglasses-fail-british-standards-262336-aQ06d5i3EbNc.
- Electro-optical sunglare filter : This is a new requirement in the new standard but only applies to Electro-optical sunglasses which are electronically controlled optical filters that change its transmittance from faded state to a darker state depending on the amount of incident light.
- Impact resistance test: This requirement has slightly changed in the new standard as this is applied to the complete sunglasses in the new standard with the correct use of headform.
The rest of the requirements in the new sunglasses standard are the same as the BS EN ISO 12312-1:2013+A1:2015.
The main highlight of the new standard is the amendment in the uniformity of the lens across the lenses which has changed from 40mm in diameter to 30mm and the tolerance has changed from 10% (in old standard) to 15% (in new standard) which is quite good for the manufacturers of sunglasses.
If you want to test your sunglasses to the new standard and want to comply with the PPE Regulations 2016/425, then contact us at /contact/ for a free consultation.