The Best Summer Hats for Men

We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn More ›

Hot summer days hold so much promise, but the truth is the sun and the heat can quickly make us feel rather uncomfortable if we’re not dressed appropriately. Wearing a good quality summer hat is an absolute must if you want to stay cool, fight off the wrinkles, and lessen the risk of skin cancer. Choose the right one and you’ll look proper dapper too!

• Activity: Are you going to be wearing your hat for sweaty trail runs, long mountain hikes or fairly sedentary fishing expeditions? A wide-brimmed hat will give you the most protection from the sun but it will also weigh more, be less packable and may adversely affect your peripheral vision. Big-brimmed hats also take on the aerial characteristics of large kites in windy conditions – trust us, you don’t want to be chasing your favourite hat back down the mountain trail. Hilarious for onlookers, but it’s a long climb back up so choose one with a drawstring…

• Features: A baseball hat has a peak of about 2.5 to 3 inches (6.5 to 7.5cm), and gives moderately good sun protection but only to your eyes and upper face (unless you wear it back-to-front to protect your neck). A full-brimmed hat with a four-inch (10cm) brim will provide far superior protection to your head, neck and shoulders but it may misbehave in windy conditions unless it features a drawstring. Mesh panels around the crown are a fantastic way to increase airflow, enabling heat to escape and cooling breezes to wash through. A built-in sweat band is a useful feature too, to keep moisture from running down into your eyes. Lightweight fabrics and foldable brims make hats more packable, while waterproof treatments enable them to shed light rain showers. Finally, if you’re exercising hard in the sizzling heat, a sun visor may be the answer. But for most of us, a hat that shades the head from radiant heat makes more sense.

• Style and Fit: A good hat will lessen your risk of developing skin cancer, and reduce the aging effects of the sun, helping your face to look younger for longer. But you do need good coverage. A downward brim will not only keep the glare out of your eyes, it will also help prevent UV rays from creeping underneath in the early morning and late afternoon when the sun is low in the sky. Tightly woven fabrics provide greater UV protection, but at the cost of reducing airflow. Some hats actually have an UPF rating, which tells you how much UV radiation the fabric will shield you from. Make sure it has enough volume for your head too. Hats that perch on top of the head can look rather comical, and are more likely to blow away in a gust of wind. Neither is a good look.