Italian brand Koo only offers one MTB goggle; this high-end Edge using lenses made by German optical giants Zeiss. Koo’s lenses are installed or removed by a clip-in system where the whole lens and frame is glued and comes off quickly in one piece by pressing a plastic tab on the left side of the main goggle. There’s also a removable, clip-in, nose guard.

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You buy the Edge with either a mirrored finish (in multiple colours) or clear lens, with the latter being the obvious choice for dark and damp UK conditions. Mirrored lenses have an anti-scratch, anti-drop and anti-reflection treatment, whereas the clear model has a special anti-fog coating called DFog with the finishes reflecting the kind of conditions you’re likely to use each lens type in.

Replacement lenses are pretty expensive at £65 for mirror and £49 for clear, so it’s a good job they resist scratching much better than most.

Koo’s goggles are a bit floppy without the lens installed, which makes it slightly tricky to line up the J-shaped hooks when changing or re-installing a lens. Luckily it’s not something you’ll need to do often. The foam backing on the frame is a bit soft and floppy too, and I needed to cinch the strap a bit tighter around my helmet to stabilise the googles on my face compared to other brands.

The Zeiss lens is really crisp and sharp, and being pre-curved means distortion is minimal and there are also no weird reflections or light halos when riding directly into a low winter sun. Koo’s DFog treatment is reasonably effective, but the lens occasionally gets misted up when the weather is foggy and damp – no more so than other lenses, but the coating does seem a bit slower to clear than some other brands.

I have a hunch that lining all the holes in the goggle frame with foam is the main reason why the Edge takes longer to de-mist – my plan is to peel off these internal foam strips to see if that helps. As the holes aren’t big enough to allow loam chunks or bugs through, I can’t see too many drawbacks. Indeed, I’m not sure why Koo didn’t do this in the first place.

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