Magna Lens Takes Away the Pain of Eye and Ear Protection

Eye and ear protection is a cornerstone of gun safety, but the problem is that eye protection and earmuffs aren’t designed to work together. The temples of the glasses rest against the side of your head, with the temple tips behind your ears, which means that the cups of the earmuffs press them into your head and ears, often painfully. It’s tolerable for short trips to the range, but can make all-day trips unpleasant.

If you need prescription glasses, like many of us, it’s even worse because unless you have prescription shooting glasses, you’re juggling two sets of glasses plus earmuffs. Usually, I just skip dedicated eye protection and wear my regular glasses with the earmuffs, which isn’t ideal against wayward casings, ricocheting bullets, and shrapnel.

But that’s not the only way eye protection interferes with ear protection. The stems of eyeglasses can create a gap in earmuffs, reducing their protection by up to 25 decibels. Some go so far as to wear earplugs under their earmuffs to make up the difference.

The simple solution is to just use earplugs, but they’re even more uncomfortable. On top of that, if they don’t fit your ears well, you could be incurring subtle hearing damage without realizing it. The gold standard is electronic muffs that block loud noises but let in conversation.

But in the basement of SHOT Show, I spotted a unique solution to this common annoyance: the Magna Lens ML Pro shooting glasses, which attach magnetically to your ear protection via magnets, sparing you from all-day ear torture. The company tells me the system preserves up to 17 decibels of hearing protection from earmuffs, since it avoids the unwanted gap in the cups.

I’ve been testing this system for months. Here, you can see me wearing it in my video about the Springfield TRP AOS:

How Magna Lens Works

The core of the ML Pro system is a pair of special frames, which can accept up to seven different interchangeable lens covers:

• Clear
• Yellow
• Orange
• Light grey
• Grey
• Light purple
• Purple

Instead of traditional temple stems, the Magna Lens frames have adjustable temple pieces on each side. At the end of each stub is a ball with a magnet inside. Those magnets attach to special adapters on your ear protection.

Magna Lens sells both prebuilt earmuffs with the requisite attachment points and also adapters for the most popular brands:

• Walker’s  Razor
• Howard Leight Impact Sport
• Sordin Supreme
• Sordin Supreme MIL
• 3M Peltor ComTac
• 3M Peltor ComTac VI
• AKT1 Sport

And many more! It seems like they add more adapters every time I visit the site. There is also a pair of glue-on adapters you can buy if there is no other option.

The adapters are straightforward to install: You yank off the bracket that attaches the headband to the ear cup and replace it with the Magna Lens adapter. I did this with both the Walker’s Razor and the Howard Leight Impact Sport. Both took a bit of force, but the entire procedure took maybe two minutes for each.

Unfortunately, obtaining the actual lenses isn’t straightforward. You can either take the insert to your local optometrist and hope they’ll grind lenses that fit, or you can contact Magna Lens directly about a custom pair. They hope to have an automated order system soon, but for now, it’s a completely manual process.

Lenses cost $60 for single-vision prescriptions and $90 for bifocals and progressive lenses, though Magna Lens highly recommends having them made by a local optometrist who can fit them to your eyes. Plus add $20 for the lens insert. Also, you’ll need a current prescription with your pupillary distance.

Magna Lens had a set made for me based on my most recent prescription. I’m blind as a bat and need a strong prescription, but they were still incredibly thin and light. The insert is flexible, as it has to be bent to fit inside the curve of the safety glasses.

Unfortunately, while I could see clearly through the first set they sent me, they made me feel fall-down drunk, as if I had had a little too much fun at the $1 margarita night at Chili’s. It’s not unusual for me to feel a bit drunk with a new style of glasses and figured I would eventually get used to it. I didn’t. While sighting in a scope mounted to a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 Sport III that I’m reviewing, I grew frustrated with the Magna Lens, pulled them off, and put my regular glasses back on.

After some back and forth, I sent them back to Magna Lens, and their lab figured out that the curvature of the insert skewed my pupillary distance. They sent back a new pair with the pupillary distance adjusted to compensate for the curve, and they work much better. The company tells me that I’m the first and only person to have this problem.

Even with that problem resolved, the sandwiching of lenses is awkward. Unless you wear gloves, it’s hard to push the insert into the safety glasses without getting fingerprints on one or both sets of lenses. I can’t stand any kind of smudges on my eyewear, so cleaning them means taking the whole thing apart, cleaning both lenses, and then carefully putting them back together.

There’s a small gap between the prescription glasses and the safety glasses, meaning dust, dirt, and sweat can get in between, which again necessitates an annoying cleaning process.

Comfort and Fit

I’ve worn the Magna Lens system while shooting and also while cleaning up my fence row with a brush cutter and chainsaw. The magnets hold firmly, and once you have them fit to your face, they’re not going to bounce or slide around. However, the system takes some fiddling to feel right, so it’s best suited for longer stretches, like all-day trips to the range or an afternoon of farm chores.

One of the challenges with the Magna Lens fit is adjusting the length of the stems so they’re not pressing into your eyes, but also so that they’re not hanging down your nose. It takes me a few seconds to get it just right whenever I put them on. I store them in a regular sunglass case and I have to push in the stems for the lenses to fit. If I had a larger case, I could keep the stems extended to the correct length at all times.

For those of us with regular prescription glasses, adjusting them becomes instinctive—tweaking the ear stems and pushing the bridge up as needed. But with the Magna Lens, you have to throw these reflexive actions out the window. Adjusting the Magna Lens to feel “right” is a balance of adjusting the stems and tweaking your hearing protection, and then it’s a balance between ensuring your ears are properly covered and making the glasses feel right.

Cost and Value

How much does it all cost? Here’s where things get painful. The basic kit with the frames, clear lenses, and a single adapter set costs $150. A kit with the full set of lenses costs $330 and individual lenses cost $40 a piece. Individual sets of adapters only cost $10. Electronic earmuffs with the built-in Magna Lenses attachment points are $70, though I haven’t tried them and can’t attest to the quality. Add in a set of single-vision lenses and you’re looking at an extra $80 for the insert and lenses. Plus, you’ll probably need a new set of prescription lenses every year.

So overall, you’re looking at around $230 before shipping and tax to get going, assuming you wear prescription lenses. That’s pretty small potatoes in the world of ear and eye protection, but does it justify the cost for most people to solve a highly specific problem?

Conclusion

I’d like to thank Steve and Nicole over at Magna Lens for sending me a complete setup, patiently answering my questions, and working with me to get the prescription fixed. They were absolutely wonderful to work with.

I’ll keep wearing the Magna Lens, and I think it’s a great system with a lot of potential. If they could get the cost down and/or integrate prescriptions into the safety glasses themselves, I think this would be a commercial home run.