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FWIW I do wear sunglasses for long highway drives at night.

Without them halogen headlights in my side mirrors give me a migraine after a while.



FYI you can get auto-dimming side mirrors (same mechanism as for rear-view mirrors). I presume it’s a pain to install them after-market, but it can be done and maybe worth it for you if brights bother you enough to wear sunglasses.


When I had some window tinting done on a car, they tinted the side mirrors at no extra charge with excess film.

At first, I didn’t like it, but quickly grew to quite like it. (It’s pretty much only annoying for seeing the curb while parallel parking at night.)


I don't think tinting is the same thing as electronic dimming.


It’s not the same mechanism, but they both reduce glare and one is wildly easier than the other to get installed for someone bothered enough to wear sunglasses on night drives.


Are you sure you mean "halogen"? *

Halogen headlights have been the most common (and relatively cheap!) kind on the road for many decades. They're just like the tungsten filament incandescent space heaters we used to use at home, except they burn at a somewhat higher color temperature. (And the way they work is really really neat, but I digress.)

Halogens, while higher-temperature than regular tungsten headlights (which haven't really been used at all in many decades) are generally "yellow"-ish compared to modern HID (aka "xenon" or "metal halide") or LED headlights.

Anyway, I'm also bothered by lights when driving at night, and I find the yellower corner of the spectrum to be the least-bothersome of common lighting colors. The glaring ~6000k white of modern HID and LED is much worse, for me, apparently because of the extra blue spectrum.

But if it really is yellow-ish halogen lights in your side mirrors that bother you most*, then I can't tell you that you're wrong.

And if that is then case, I can potentially offer some constructive advice: I've owned a couple of cars (specifically, a 4th gen Firebird and an E36 BMW -- both products of the middle 1990s) that came from the factory with side mirror glass that was tinted a pale blue.

The slightly-blue tint attenuated yellow halogen lights, by design. It's a clever bit of optical filtering.

During the day, in the sun where there's tons of light, they worked mostly-normally: Reflected images had little bit of blue tinge, but whatever.

And at night, the halogen headlights that were nearly-ubiquitous in the 1990s had their reflected intensity turned down automatically. Compared to cars with mirrors that used clear glass, I could still see the lights of the cars behind me just fine. They were simply less-blinding.

It worked great around the times those cars were produced.

If that's really the problem you're experiencing*, then a very pale blue window tint on the mirrors may be exactly what you want for that issue.

* (I asked for specificity because it's important. That Firebird and E36 both became increasingly-annoying for me to drive at night as HID and LED lights became increasingly-common, and towards the end of my time driving them I was seriously considering having clear glass mirrors cut and swapping over to that. Not because the blue tint wasn't effective at filtering out halogen light (it was great at that!), but because it seemed to magnify the problems I experience with HID and LED headlights. The world was changing, and the unchanged spectral filtering became a burden instead of a boon.)


No, I have no clue, I'm just thoughtlessly repeating what I've heard.

The things that give me a migraine look almost purple, so I'm guessing it's HID / LED and not halogen.


Yeah. HID/LED are the usual offenders.

I've found that yellow-tinted glasses help a bunch with those types, and I keep some in the car that I do use occasionally.

(There's a grossly misinterpreted study that people sometimes point at when saying that yellow glasses can't help and can only hurt, but the study itself doesn't support that conclusion.)




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