You Should Layer Your Gloves. Here’s Why.

Ever spend an hour hiking in the winter and find your fingers quickly lose feeling? That’s your body telling you that it’s too damn cold out, and bringing your warm blood back into your chest. Numb hands can be frustrating, and for good reason. Allowing your hands to get cold reduces dexterity and feel—which is bummer, since you need your hands for pretty much any activity you want to do outdoors in cold weather.

Donning gloves and mittens might seem like a no-brainer solution, but the way you wear and layer your gloves makes an enormous difference in just how much you can actually warm your fingers.

A Cold Core Means Cold Hands

Blood flows from your heart to your hands through the ulnar and radial arteries. When your core gets cold, your body contracts the muscles around those arteries, restricting blood flow. This is a simple survival mechanism—your organs are more important than your fingers, so your body prioritizes warming your core.

The good news is that by keeping the rest of your body comfortable, you can keep blood flowing to your extremities.

Your cold hands may not be due to inadequate gloves; they can also be caused by failing to wear a warm enough jacket, hat, insulated boots, or neck protection. The most effective piece of clothing to insulate your core is a puffy vest. Even if your layering system already feels full, a vest’s armless design may enable one to fit between a mid-layer and puffy jacket, where it will meaningfully increase core warmth, and therefore comfort for your hands, too.

I made this suggestion to a friend a few years ago. We were canoeing in frigid weather, and despite both of us wearing glove liners and insulated, waterproof gloves, he couldn’t keep his hands from getting so cold that he lost his grip on the paddle. I loaned him a thin puffy vest, he layered that inside his jacket, and his comfort improved almost immediately.

To Choose a Glove, Study the Insulation

I see lots of my friends form loyalties to certain brands without paying much attention to the details of the actual products. But as with most other items of gear, we can use information online to define and understand the merits of individual gloves.

Those cheap, hardware store gloves everyone loves? They are often made out of very basic spun-polyester insulation, the same kind that comes in those cheap, bulky box store sleeping bags. Just like cheap sleeping bags with supposed zero-degree Fahrenheit ratings that still leave you freezing in much warmer temperatures, the insulation in low-end gloves can be bulky and inefficient.

But while cheap, synthetic gloves can leave your fingers cold, quality synthetic insulation is ideal for gloves. Not only are spun polyester fibers capable of trapping more air in less volume versus goose and duck down, but synthetics are also capable of maintaining their loft—and therefore their performance—when wet.

Your best option is to seek out Primaloft Gold insulation. Gloves made with Primaloft Gold are thinner and warmer than the cheap alternatives because they’re spun out of a much tighter-woven polyester.

There is also a variety of Primaloft Gold that uses fibers partially made from Aerogel, the lightest and most insulating material known to man. Aerogel insulates even when compressed, making it particularly suited to gloves because it keeps you warm when you’re gripping something. Primaloft Gold made with Aerogel is called CrossCore Technology.

When it comes to synthetic insulations, we can also divine its relative warmth and bulk levels by looking at the density of the material used in a particular item, expressed in grams-per-square-meter (GSM). You can look at two different pairs of gloves made using the same insulation, and compare their relative warmth and thickness by reading their GSM numbers.

Want Warmer Hands for Cheap? Start Layering.

All this talk of high-tech performance probably sounds expensive. It doesn’t need to be. By thinking about gloves as a layering system in the same way you might for the rest of your technical clothing, you can achieve a ton of performance across a wide variety of conditions—without spending a fortune.

The most useful pair of gloves in my arsenal is probably L.L. Bean’s Primaloft Packaway Gloves. At $50, a pair of Packaways is made from 60 GSM Primaloft Gold with CrossCore Technology housed in an ultralight polyester shell with fake leather reinforcements on the palm. That amount of insulation and the shell material makes the Packaway Gloves feel similar to a lightweight puffy jacket.

On their own, they’re perfect for everything from summer trips in the high alpine to dog walks in mild winter weather. But layering the L.L. Bean gloves delivers comfort even through extreme conditions. Here’s my glove layering system.

I begin with a base layer, just like long underwear when I’m dressing to go outside. I wear a $45 set of Hestra Merino Touch Point glove liners. The Hestras come with a nice bonus: touch-screen compatibility. The little capacitive touch screen pads may not allow you to fire off long text messages at your usual speed, but they can provide the ability to pinch and swipe a map or take a picture.

How much additional warmth can a liner add? Hestra—a high quality glove maker from Sweden—pegs the number at up to 20 percent. You will feel a difference. To accommodate a liner, size up your main insulating glove by one.

Liner gloves aren’t very effective against wind, precipitation, impacts, abrasion, or lacerations. I fall down while skiing often, so I wear a set of Vermont Uphill Skiers ($150) as an outer shell over a liner and Primaloft midlayer glove. I then add a significant application of leather conditioner and waterproofing to the Uphill Skier gloves. Replacing Vermont’s removable lightweight merino insulation with the Primalofts and liners adds plenty of downhill to the Uphills, which keep the weather and snow from my crashes on the outside. How much additional warmth can a shell glove add to a system? Hestra says that a liner and shell together can add up to 50 percent more warmth to your primary glove.

You don’t necessarily need to use the same (fairly pricey) liners and shells I do. Liner gloves are available at your local big box store for very low prices. If you don’t like a leather shell glove, you’ll find that ones made from synthetic materials and waterproof membranes will actually deliver more performance at lower prices, at the expense of durability.

And you can apply this approach to any midweight glove already in your arsenal. If, for example, you bought those 50 GSM Primaloft Gold with CrossCore Technology Beyond Guide Gloves ($135) I wrote about two years ago and still wear regularly, then adding a liner and outer shell can reap the same performance increases.

Are Heated Gloves Worth the Money?

That depends. But it’s certain that a heat source dramatically increases the warmth of your gloves.

The traditional way to add heat to a glove is to shove a chemical heat pack down the back of your gloves, so it rests on the back of your hand where the blood vessels running to your fingers pass close to your skin.  over a liner glove can prevent the packs from feeling too hot.

I have a pair of Outdoor Research Prevail heated mittens that I pull out of my gear closet for really nasty activities like ice fishing without a shelter, or for the coldest of days on the ski hill. But electrically heated gloves aren’t perfect. My Prevail mittens cost $340, an arm and a leg for a pair of gloves.

What I paid for is quality and reliability. While the battery packs used in my gloves are pretty much a replaceable commodity these days, the wiring that generates the heat is not. More expensive options typically spread their heating wires over larger areas of the glove (in useful places like the fingers), and make them out of stronger materials that are less likely to fail due to fraying and bending.

Expect to replace your battery packs at least once every two years. Storing batteries charged can help ensure they last that long. But my Outdoor Research gloves have held up in like-new condition since 2016.

The final thing I look for in a pair of gloves: reliability. I don’t bother dragging heated gloves into the backcountry, or on any adventures where a failure might put my fingers at risk. With your hands and fingers so exposed to the cold, and so easily damaged by it, you want gloves that will continue to work if submerged in freezing cold water, after crashing through a snow drift, and even in the event of a badly timed ice axe or ski pole swing. Classic materials like wool and leather are capable of withstanding that kind of abuse, and will keep you warm when paired with high-performance synthetic insulation.

Wes Siler spends more time in gloves each winter than your average skier, and he barely hits the slopes. You can find him splitting wood and working on his trucks outside his Bozeman, Montana, home.