In recent years more and more athletes seemed to be wearing them. Considering :
I find it curious since for me, I think it makes a big difference so surprised it’s losing traction rather than gaining.
I think yesterday I saw the Hoff rocking one (and in Texas two weeks ago) and Anne Haug.
Lots of pros had them on yesterday. Lots of AGer’s as well.
Sounds like you use one, can you describe what it feels like?
I had considered getting one but I keep getting hung up on 2 things:
It just looks strange lol
It has a whiff of snake oil and for the price that whiff seems risky
The concept seems plausible but isn’t that what enables snake oil to always sell.
There is no question evaporative cooling works wonders in a climate like Saint-George. The question is how is this headband making evaporative cooling better.
Taking the headband’s claim at face value, we have an around 20 square inches of surface area that the headband effectively multiplies by 5 (claim), so 100 square inches, whereas an average male has 3200 square inches of skin. So believing the claims this leads to an improvement in cooling capacity of 2.5%.
I do not know that this translates in significant performance gains. I do not even know that the 5x improvement in cooling surface area is true or can even ve substanciated.
I’m a mountaineer and polar climate aficionado. I know that if a garment has wicking properties, it also has insulating properties. Evaporation that happens away from the skin does not provide the same cooling effect as evaporation that happens on the skin surface. I highly doubt the claims the headband increases effective cooling surface area by 5x.
I believe this headband does a better job at keeping sweat away from your eyes than it does cooling you.
If you really believe in the technology then you only need to wear a tight fitting polartec power grid t-shirt inside out and give it a go. That will provide a massive 34% surface area coverage. I recon power grid does not have the same profile as Omius’s material, so I’ll give it a 3x effective surface area multiplier for a total cooling improvement of 68%. Now we’re talking!
Head over to https://www.specialized.com/us/en/mens-power-grid-short-sleeve-baselayer/p/200374 save 74 bucks and get much better results!
Nice reasoning but you’re missing some key stuff.
The improvement in cooling capacity of the body doesn’t just depend on increasing the total surface area of the skin, the amplified region choice is super important. There are certain parts of the body that evolved to dissipate more heat than others thanks to the presence of Arterio-Venous Anastomoses (AVAs), like the hands, feet and forehead. If you amplify one of these regions, the overall effect will be greater. Craig Heller at Stanford, did great research about that. https://news.stanford.edu/2012/08/29/cooling-glove-research-082912/
This is the formula for surface area amplification: (Total surface area of the cooling piece - base area)/base area.
Wicking properties and thermal conductivity are two independent properties of a material. With a regular wicking fabric, it is true that evaporation that happens away from the skin is less efficient, because textiles are thermal insulators. The Omius material is order of magnitudes more conductive than textiles, due to its graphite composition. That’s why you can evaporate water a half an inch away from the skin and still obtain its benefits.
You should try it out! 
Tavole, do you have a conflict of interest to disclose here?
Interesting that you have just joined in the last few hours to respond to this thread.
Haha yes! I’m Gustavo, the Omius founder. I just saw this post and decided to join to explain how our tech really works.
Thank you for your cool product. 😎 I used it in St. G. on Saturday and was impressed with it effectiveness. Especially with running into a headwind. I could feel it getting colder after pouring water on my head and anytime the wind increased. I saw at least 40-50 of them. Hard to know for sure as there were a lot of people and the 2 loop out and back course meant we saw each other a lot.
Would be great to have your band incorporated into a visor or hat similar to what Hoffman uses. Some of us need protection from the sun as well.
Would be great to have your band incorporated into a visor or hat similar to what Hoffman uses. Some of us need protection from the sun as well.
I asked this 2 years ago almost to the day (8th of May 2020) !
“At the moment we are working on a visor and our plan is to develop a cap afterwards with the technology integrated in some form but we don’t have a launch date for that yet.”
That was 2 years ago - alas all I see on the website is people with visors with big chunks cut out to fit the band.
Would be great to have your band incorporated into a visor or hat similar to what Hoffman uses. Some of us need protection from the sun as well.
I asked this 2 years ago almost to the day (8th of May 2020) !
“At the moment we are working on a visor and our plan is to develop a cap afterwards with the technology integrated in some form but we don’t have a launch date for that yet.”
That was 2 years ago - alas all I see on the website is people with visors with big chunks cut out to fit the band.
+1
Any published material? That was hardly scientific.
If anything AVAs double the flow in the supplying artery, but that’s still marginal in the grand scheme of things.
Any published article that measured a change in flow velocities of facial or temporal arteries which could indicate the presence of AVAs on the forehead?
Why did you not go with gloves instead of headband? Seems to me this would have led to better results.
I can believe the thermal conductivity claim, and the improved cooling efect from increased surface area. However, barring substanciated claims, in the aggregate I don’t see anything that convincingly supports this product improving an athlete’s performance.
Lots of pros had them on yesterday. Lots of AGer’s as well.
Pros get them for free or are paid to wear them; AGers copy the pros.
Sounds like you use one, can you describe what it feels like?
I had considered getting one but I keep getting hung up on 2 things:
It just looks strange lol
It has a whiff of snake oil and for the price that whiff seems risky
The concept seems plausible but isn’t that what enables snake oil to always sell.
I used one of the new ones at IMAZ last year. When you put it on it feels remarkably cold, almost like putting ice on your forehead. You adjust to this quickly but it still feels cool on your skin. I have no strong opinion on whether it ‘works’ after having used it. I was on a horrible day anyway, so cooling wasn’t my problem and the band wasn’t going to help. I did receive a lot of comments on it from spectators, mostly not positive. It is pretty fragile as well. I will keep using my band in hot races, I can’t say whether I’d replace it if I lost or ruined it though.
I do a lot of ‘lap’ running in my Ironman training (making 2-4 mile loops that I repeat), maybe would be worthwhile to try some on/off running and just see what happens, if I can notice any differences. Will try to update this thread this summer if I get around to it.
Haha yes! I’m Gustavo, the Omius founder. I just saw this post and decided to join to explain how our tech really works.
Your product is too expensive. Me and many people would love to use it but it’s just priced too high for what it is and the benefit it provides. I don’t think you will have much adoption of your product at those prices.
Lots of pros had them on yesterday.
Besides Haug and Hoffman (mentioned ^^) I did not see any of the top 10 (either race) wearing these.
Can you identify a few more?
Haha yes! I’m Gustavo, the Omius founder. I just saw this post and decided to join to explain how our tech really works.
Would be good to get an answer to the hat question (from 2020).
And to see non-sponsored research into the product’s effectiveness, but I suspect that’s asking too much.
Thanks for all your comments! We are working hard to make the product better, and it’s really helpful to read your positive and negative feedback. I’ll try to answer them below:
Our body can more easily detect the cooling effect when there’s a temperature difference between the skin and the cooling material. This happens when you first put it on, or when the material is rapidly cooled, like in the case of a wind gust or water flowing through it. After a while you may stop feeling the cooling effect, because your skin temperature approaches the one from the material and it gets used to its continuous cooling stimuli. As long as the material is wet, it will continue to evaporate water from its extended surface and it will keep cooling you. You can verify this by removing your headband and quickly touching your skin, you will feel it cooler than other parts of your body. Using a thermal camera or thermometor, are also great ways of testing this.
We were developing a visor a few years ago, but it turned out to be a very difficult manufacturing problem, with our previous method of attaching the cooling pieces to the fabric. They were kind of glued to it, so you couldn’t remove them during the manufacturing process of the visor, which limited the types of machines that could be used. With our new attaching method, the pieces can now be removed which makes things much much easier. We are starting to work with a great company, to make the visor a reality asap. We also had a tough time during the pandemic, so this development was slowed down.
We haven’t paid any athlete to use our tech. We gave them free headbands so they can try them out, if they like them, they use them in races. This has been a great way of obtaining quality feedback during the development process. The pandemic forced us to limit the amount of free product given, but we’re getting back to it.
I totally agree that we should do a non-sponsored lab test to validate the technology. We have been contacted by some research groups and that may happen very soon, not just with a headband, but with other products we are developing to have a greater impact at the core level, and not just in the local area (i.e. head).
The cooling pieces are fragile due to its graphite composition. There’s a tradeoff between durability and performance. If the piece has thinner profiles, it will be lighter and have a greater heat exchange surface area, but it will be more fragile. We are trying to find the right balance, and we are taking actions to improve the user experience. For example: offering replacement pieces, improving the protective case and communicating better how the headband should be handled. There seems to be a bit of a learning curve to the latter, because of how different our material is to regular fabrics.
I hope this helps
Gustavo
Thanks for all your comments! We are working hard to make the product better, and it’s really helpful to read your positive and negative feedback.
. . . .
I hope this helps
Gustavo
Great, quality answer - thank you.
Thanks for all your comments! We are working hard to make the product better, and it’s really helpful to read your positive and negative feedback. I’ll try to answer them below:
Our body can more easily detect the cooling effect when there’s a temperature difference between the skin and the cooling material. This happens when you first put it on, or when the material is rapidly cooled, like in the case of a wind gust or water flowing through it. After a while you may stop feeling the cooling effect, because your skin temperature approaches the one from the material and it gets used to its continuous cooling stimuli. As long as the material is wet, it will continue to evaporate water from its extended surface and it will keep cooling you. You can verify this by removing your headband and quickly touching your skin, you will feel it cooler than other parts of your body. Using a thermal camera or thermometor, are also great ways of testing this.
We were developing a visor a few years ago, but it turned out to be a very difficult manufacturing problem, with our previous method of attaching the cooling pieces to the fabric. They were kind of glued to it, so you couldn’t remove them during the manufacturing process of the visor, which limited the types of machines that could be used. With our new attaching method, the pieces can now be removed which makes things much much easier. We are starting to work with a great company, to make the visor a reality asap. We also had a tough time during the pandemic, so this development was slowed down.
We haven’t paid any athlete to use our tech. We gave them free headbands so they can try them out, if they like them, they use them in races. This has been a great way of obtaining quality feedback during the development process. The pandemic forced us to limit the amount of free product given, but we’re getting back to it.
I totally agree that we should do a non-sponsored lab test to validate the technology. We have been contacted by some research groups and that may happen very soon, not just with a headband, but with other products we are developing to have a greater impact at the core level, and not just in the local area (i.e. head).
The cooling pieces are fragile due to its graphite composition. There’s a tradeoff between durability and performance. If the piece has thinner profiles, it will be lighter and have a greater heat exchange surface area, but it will be more fragile. We are trying to find the right balance, and we are taking actions to improve the user experience. For example: offering replacement pieces, improving the protective case and communicating better how the headband should be handled. There seems to be a bit of a learning curve to the latter, because of how different our material is to regular fabrics.
I hope this helps
Gustavo
Thanks for the reply
If/when you (finally) get the visor out, please make it compatible with current cooling pieces, so that current customers can just purchase the visor and not have to pay the hefty price of re-purchasing everything.
thank you.
It was over 90f today in NY, so I finally got to do a test run with it (6 miles). I had water bottles in a belt and kept squirting water on it.
a. The design is terrible - I have sensitive eyes and need visor/hat (even with sunglasses). There’s no way to wear a hat/visor above it. I wore a hat backwards (at least protected my neck from the sun) and the problem is my forehead is exposed where the hat’s strap is. I can see this ending with a semi-circle tan or burn in a long race. I guess I can try to cut a running hat open in the front and connect the band with safety pins - but that is insane for a $200 product.
b. More important, I can’t say I felt it had any cooling impact whatsoever, it is nothing like when you throw cold water/ice on yourself in a race. At some point I took it off and turned the hat around, felt exactly the same heat wise. Maybe it is not possible to perceive the cooling, but I was expecting a much more dramatic impact for a $200 product.
So just my N=1 and only one run, I’ll do some more testing. But thus far I’m extremely disappointed at the results.
Did I mention the price?