Choosing a hat for daily walks

A walking hat has an easy job and most hats still fail it, because an hour is long enough to expose everything a five-minute try-on hides.

Coverage

A standard cap brim shades your eyes and the upper half of your face. It does nothing for your ears, your neck, or the sides of your face, which is where most incidental sun exposure actually lands.

If your walk is midday and long, a wider brim covers more. If it is early or late, or if you want a hat that works for the rest of the day too, a cap is the more practical choice and you are accepting narrower coverage in exchange.

Wind

Wind is what separates hats that fit from hats that are merely the right size. A hat that sits high catches air at the front edge of the crown and lifts. A hat with correct crown depth sits lower and closer, and the wind passes over it.

If you are holding your hat on in moderate wind, the crown is too shallow for your head.

Heat

Dark colors absorb more heat, which is a real effect on a sunny walk and a small one compared to how much shade the brim provides.

More important is what sits against your forehead. Any band that traps sweat rather than moving it becomes uncomfortable at around the thirty-minute mark, which is exactly when a walk gets long enough to matter.

An hour in

Almost every fit problem shows up between minute thirty and minute sixty. Pressure points at the temples, a strap digging in at the back, a brim slowly dropping into your eyeline.

Try a hat on and wear it around the house for an hour before deciding it fits. That single hour tells you more than any size chart will.