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, . 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 . 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 . 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 ($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 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.

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Most gloves are insulated with lofted synthetic materials. Versus down or wool, synthetics are less prone to soaking up water and provide more warmth with less thickness. Both merits are important, since your hands are going to be exposed to wet stuff more often and persistently than any other body part other than your feet, and because every every additional iota of puff around your fingers works to reduce your sense of touch.

In short, every glove represents a compromise. You can make them out of waterproof membranes and completely prevent moisture from invading, but the fragile nature of stretched out Teflon means they wouldn’t be a solution for rough work. That’s why so many ski gloves fall apart after just one season. And, sure, you can pile so much insulation into gloves that you’ll never feel the cold, but doing so will make them impossible to wear. That’s why your hands are always cold.

The material used for the shell and the warmth-to-thickness ratio of the insulation are the primary determining factors in a pair of gloves’ ability to keep your hands warm.

For its shell, gear company Beyond employs a thick, supple cow belly leather for most of the construction, and conductive goat leather for the tips of the thumbs and index fingers, so you can work the capacitive touchscreens on smartphones. The back of the thumb is also covered in suede, so you can wipe snot off your face.

The embossed honeybee on the back of each hand is a reminder to apply a when you first get the gloves and regularly throughout their lives. Leather on its own isn’t waterproof. But, because it’s porous, you can fill those pores up with oil or wax to prevent water from entering. Non-toxic beeswax remains in those pores a little more durably than most other substances, and cultivating bees is a boon for the environment. The mix also contains eucalyptus oil and lavender, which work to keep the leather soft. Just be warned: your entire house will smell like a bath bomb when you open the can.

Inside the leather is 51 grams of Primaloft Gold Insulation with Cross Core. The weight of an insulation is a measure of density, and represents the weight of a square meter of the insulation. Fifty-one grams is a little over half the density of the insulation typically used to construct an ultralight synthetic jacket (which should give you an idea of how thick these gloves are). But this particular insulation has an additional trick up its sleeve, because its fibers are woven from a blend of materials containing Aerogel, the lightest, most insulative material known to mankind. That enables those fibers to trap air internally, making it warmer than similar materials, and they continue to provide a significant amount of insulation even when compressed. This is the same stuff Sitka, a technologically innovative hunting brand, uses in its new Aerolite range of apparel and sleeping bags. The gloves then retain that insulation using wool liners. The Guides are the only gloves yet available with Primaloft Gold Insulation with Cross Core.

I’ve been wearing the Guide Gloves daily for two full winters now, for activities as mundane as walking the dogs, and in more challenging roles like snowmobiling and skiing. The coldest conditions they’ve seen have reached nearly negative 40, and they’ve kept my hands entirely warm throughout—without the aid of any sort of liner glove. I still try plenty of other brands and types of glove, in pursuit of ever elusive perfection and certain sport-specific features like flip-off fingers, but no other glove has ever been this warm.

Also notable is how well the Guide Gloves have held up to all that use. Now entering their third winter, they show no sign of wear: all the seams are intact, the neoprene cuffs aren’t pilling, and there’s not even a scuff on the leather.

They’re not perfect of course. The insulation may be thinner than anything this warm has any right to be, but they’re still heavily insulated gloves. You’re not going to be able to manipulate a trigger or shutter while wearing them, and despite their touchscreen compatibility, your odds of typing out a text are precisely zero. They’re also a simple general purpose glove that lacks speciality features, like a long gauntlet cuff or wrist leashes. Skiers, hunters, photographers, and climbers may require something designed specially for those activities.

But, if you’re just someone who wants warmer hands, then the Guide Gloves will almost certainly give them to you.

I remembered to write this article because I pulled the gloves and their bee balm out of the closet before heading up to the cabin for Christmas. It’ll be 18 degrees below zero when we arrive, but I’ll be able to unload the truck, and walk the dogs, without frozen fingers. But first, I’m going to apply another layer of that balm.

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