I love to spend time in the mountains camping, fishing, and hiking. Exploring the great outdoors is extremely relaxing and enjoyable, unless I forget my HAT! In fact, being outdoors without a hat can be extremely miserable under certain conditions!
With a little bit of research and a fair amount of personal experience, I have created a list of 7 reasons why you should always wear a hat when you are outdoors, whether gardening in your backyard or hiking to the peak of a mountain!
It’s no secret that the sun can do some serious damage to your skin, acutely and overtime. The type of damage to your skin is dependent upon several factors such as, the amount of time in the sun, angle of the sun’s rays, skin cells health, and previous skin damage.
Most people don’t know, but a sunburn is classified as a First-Degree burn. Repeated sunburns on the same place, such as, your nose, ears or even cheeks can lead to a more serious skin condition like cancer.
Hats with a brim, such as a ball cap or a full 360 brim hat are great for protecting our facial skin from sunburns and other more serious skin conditions.
While sunglasses are the preferred method for protecting your eyes, hats can also provide protection for your eyes! The sun emits two different types of UV rays: UV-A and UV-B. Both types of UV-rays can cause eye problems. For example:
UV-A can damage your central vision by causing damage the macula which is a part of the retina located at the back of your eye.
UV-B can also damage eyes even though the cornea and the lens of the eyes absorb most of the UV-B rays.
Hats with brims will block a good portion of the UV-Rays from entering your eyes and causing damage. The wider and longer the brim, the better protection your eyes will have from the sun and its harmful UV-rays.
Have you ever been bitten by a horse fly? I have and it hurts! While at scout camp years ago, I was bitten on the back of my head by the biggest baddest horse fly I have ever seen, or at least that’s how I tell the story.
Having a good hat that not only keeps the UV-rays out but can be a deterrent to bug attacks can be important whenever you are in the outdoors! This is true for mosquitoes or any other biting insect as well! Less surface area for them to get their little mouth parts on the better.
Hats help provide some shade on those hot summer days. Maybe not to the extent of sitting under a tree can provide, but nonetheless some degree of relief from the direct rays of the sun. Just last week while out fishing in the middle of the river, I was extremely happy to have my hat with me as the sun was glaring down on me.
Full (360°) brim hats are much better for shade than a standard baseball cap. Some hats are fitted with a neck flat that is rated at 50+ UPF. Even if the hat provides but a little shade, it can make a difference on how you feel than having no hat on at all.
It’s hard to hike in the rain, even harder if you don’t have a hat to keep the water out of your eyes or off your glasses.
Some of the reported outdoors mishaps of people getting injured or even killed while they were hiking in the rain due to obscured vision are difficult to comprehend. Nonetheless, the restricted or blurred vision lead to tripping over a branch of other obscured object, stepping in a hole and breaking a leg or tumbling down the side of the mountain to their death with the root cause being rain in their eyes or collecting on their glasses lead to a miscalculation in foot placement due to less than optimal vision.
Hats are a great way to keep the warmth in on a cool night. While the myth of “50% of the body heat escapes out of the head” has been debunked, heat lost from the head, which accounts for about 7% of the body’s total surface area, contributes to about 7% to 10% of heat loss. Obviously, a beanie will keep you warmer than a ball cap, but even having a ball cap to help keep some of the warmth from escaping is far better than no hat at all.
When you’re miles away from a shower or bath, you’ll be grateful to have a hat that covers up the non-showered, unruly, out of control bed hair so that you can take a million photos for your Facebook and Instagram accounts for all your friends to see!
If you’re looking for a hat to take with you on your next adventure, check out our line of hats by clicking HERE.
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