Can A New Wetsuit Liner Save You A Mil?
Quiksilver and Primaloft say yes — and they’ve got the science to back it up.
The best wetsuit is your favorite pair of boardshorts.
Which is a problem, cuz hypothermia.
Cold water is a cheat code to emptier lineups, but too much neoprene can add an element of clumsiness to anyone’s surfing. Should we do some math?
Two years ago, over 1000 people told Stab their height, weight, skill level and board dimensions. We used this data to see how much volume people ride corresponding to their body weight.
On average, we found that advanced surfers ride .17 liters per pound or .38 liters per kilogram on their normal shortboard. Multiply your weight by that number and bam, you have an idea of how much volume your counterparts have tucked under their chests.
Say you’ve got a 160-pound person. When wet, a 4/3 and booties could weigh up to 7.5 pounds. If we look at that pound-per-liter ratio, their shorty should jump from 27.2 liters to 28.5.
Yeah, that matters.
So if less neoprene is more fun, a designer’s mind might toil with ways to eliminate it. Enter: Quiksilver’s soon-to-be-released range of wetsuits with Primaloft.
You might now be wondering: The fuck is Primaloft?
Glad you asked.
Primaloft was invented by the US Army forty years ago as a synthetic alternative to down. Despite said army’s lackluster performance in the past half-century or so (not the result I wanted, etc), the tech stuck around. It’s now used in a wide range of consumer-facing products designed to keep human bodies warm.
The warmth-to-weight ratio is hard to beat, so you’re likely to find it puffing up any high-end jacket. It’s about to be available in wetsuits for the first time.
“It’s a weave of ultra-fine fiber, which is warmer when you compare it with a cross-section of normal polyester fiber. That’s the technology across every product they do,” says Paolo Magiorelli, who used to design yachts (true story — he also makes his own limoncello), and is one of the minds behind the suit.
“The goal was to make a suit that you could wear as a 3/2 when everyone else is in a 4/3.” Sounds nice. And they can back it up with data from a proper wetsuit warmth test.
Oh, how do you properly test a wetsuit’s warmth? Expose the outside to a temperature-controlled cold plate. Wait a bit, and use a laser to measure the temperature on the inside. Bam, you just did science.
The result: Primaloft suits were 35% warmer than Quik’s previous top-of-the-line liner, which they called Warmflight Eco Velvet. They’re now working on testing it against competitors’ suits. You’d hate to be a cold plate around Saint Jean de Luz, France these days.
With their normal range of suits, Quik recommends you wear a 3/2 when it’s 16°C – 20°C / 62°F – 68°F and take the leap to a 4/3 when it hits 14°C – 17°C / 58°F – 63°F. The 35% math checks out.
Now, let’s flip to a more familiar form of wetsuit testing: the anecdotal form.
Quiksilver recently showed up in Portugal with a truck full of demo suits for their CT team to test. The water was hovering around 15 degrees. Not bad. But with record-breaking winds, torrents of rainstorms, and 10-degree air temps, most people were running 4/3s — just not most of the Quik guys.
“This suit is an absolute game-changer,” said Jackson Bunch before reiterating the fact that he wore a 3-mil all trip. We could show you similar quotes from the rest of their team, but don’t it mean more when it comes from a kid raised on Maui?
The suits will be available to the publc in August, and will feature in the next edition of the Stab Best Wetsuits test.
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