A dozen miles from the Pacific Ocean, at California State University in San Marcos, surfers paddle against a current in a temperature-controlled tank. The flume pool is part of the university’s , led by surf-obsessed kinesiology professors Sean Newcomer and Jeff Nessler.

Newcomer (blond, bespectacled, and well-built) and Nessler (lean, bald, and hydrodynamic) are driven by the question of how to use scientific research to make surfing equipment better. To do that, they’ve enlisted the help of 40 undergraduates who are part of Cal State San Marcos’s nine-year-old surf studies program. This kind of niche subject is not profitable for universities or easy to get funding for. “It’s not a sustainable model for a large university to do this research,” Newcomer says. “The way we get around it is it’s part of our educational process; it’s incorporated into our curriculum.”

Ten minutes across campus, the indoor surf laboratories double as classrooms. Motion cameras, a swim bench ergometer, and a treadmill on hydraulics are just placed around the lab, ready to measure how surfers move. Closets are crammed with foam boards, and plastic bins are stuffed with wetsuits from past experiments. Nessler, a mechanical engineer by trade, has even built a few contraptions that exist nowhere else in the country, like a surfboard simulator on pistons that rages like a mechanical bull to mimic riding a wave.

But their main focus has become how wetsuits, the uniform of cold-water surfers, . “We’ve become a wetsuit testing laboratory,” Newcomer says. “The surfing industry doesn’t have a tremendous amount of money for R and D.” That’s too bad, because Newcomer and Nessler’s research has delivered a surprise: wetsuits, even those with inflated prices, thanks to what brands claim are “clinically proven” materials, are not as warm and flexible as they could be. “What the surf industry is marketing is not driven by science,” Newcomer told me.

The first wetsuits, after World War II, were thick and stiff but transformed a diver’s ability to stay warm. Unlike the wool layers and drysuits previously used by the military, these new wetsuits let in a small amount of water, which was heated by the body and insulated against frigid external temperatures. In the 1950s, the nascent surfing industry borrowed from the Navy’s research to create the first commercial wetsuits specifically for the sport. (Surf brand founder Jack O’Neill and businessman Bob Meistrell of the sport’s modern wetsuit design.) Unlike cold-water diving, surfing takes place in two different mediums—air and water—and surfers require much more flexibility than someone who is fully submerged with a scuba tank. So when neoprene made the leap into the industry, designers started making modifications.

Wetsuits now are a far cry from those first dive-based suits, which made natural movements difficult. Products hanging on racks today allow surfers to perform aquatic acrobatics in some of the coldest water on earth. But Hub Hubbard, product line manager for Patagonia’s wetsuit category (and before that at Billabong), told me that many of the design decisions that have been made within the industry over the decades have not been based on hard science. “It’s all been kind of anecdotal,” he says.

This is in large part because even the most committed wetsuit companies struggle to capture real-world data scientifically. Many of these brands conduct materials testing in their labs and collect data on the insulating properties of myriad neoprenes, but it’s often done without a surfer inside. In-ocean testing typically amounts to giving a dozen or so surfers a few wetsuit prototypes and then listening to their feedback. At O’Neill Wetsuits, a core group of about ten surfers try on five or so suits each season and provide feedback, according to Greg Clarke, the brand’s vice president of product development. “We’ve got close to 70 years of trial and error,” he says, on everything from “where the neoprene is placed to the overall comfort and functionality of how the wetsuit fits on the body.”

While these methods have made wetsuits warmer and more flexible over the years, Newcomer and Nessler had a hunch that they could be better.

The professors first realized how much wetsuits could be improved in 2002. Nike had purchased Hurley, bringing its coffers and commitment to science over to the surf industry. Hurley, under Nike, tried modifying a wetsuit with a new material, theorizing that it would improve its thermodynamics. Then the company took a rare step in the wetsuit industry: it asked scientists to design an experiment and collect the necessary data to prove or disprove its hypothesis.

Enter Nessler and Newcomer. They looked into the material that Hurley had incorporated and found that it improved nothing. Bruce Moore, Hurley’s former vice president of innovation, told me that the company kept bringing other wetsuits and raw materials for Nessler and Newcomer to test. “We wanted to see whether they actually worked in the scientific setting or whether they’re just kind of marketing stories and people just selling snake oil,” Moore says.

One material was similar to the Mylar emergency blankets distributed to runners after a marathon. Hurley wanted to see whether the claim that this material reflected more heat back to the body would also be true in the ocean. The results of the study proved the assumption to be false.

Not only did the research for Hurley unveil bogus claims, but the professors also learned new information about what would actually improve wetsuit design. Most modern wetsuits pad the wetsuit’s core with more millimeters of neoprene and decrease the thickness in the extremities. The professors concluded that was actually bad design.

In —the first one published in 2018 and co-authored with a Nike scientist—Newcomer and Nessler used thermal sensors to collect data on regional skin temperatures in recreational surfers wearing 2-millimeter wetsuits. The data showed that the average surfer didn’t need the extra millimeters around their core (unless perhaps they were riding waves near the Arctic Circle). Instead, they needed the thickest neoprene over the lower half of their body—the calves, thighs, stomach, and lower back. Those were the regions submerged in water for the most amount of time and consequently the areas that lost the most heat. Those regions also received the least exposure to the sun and weren’t utilized as much as the upper body’s paddling muscles. (When researchers have tracked surfers’ activity, they’ve found that surfers spend the majority of time paddling during a session, followed by sitting idle. They only actually surf between 2 percent and 5 percent of the time.)

The data showed a difference of nearly 18 degrees between the warmer upper back and the colder skin of the lower legs after a 40-minute surf session. “When you shunt blood away from the extremities, the underlying skeletal muscle suffers,” Newcomer says. That’s part of why sprinters engage in hour-long warm-ups: to circulate warm blood to the legs and arms. “The last thing you want that sprinter to do is sit in an ice bath for 15 minutes before their sprint.”

The same is true of surfers, who sit in something akin to ice baths: cold oceans. Typical wetsuits don’t efficiently protect against this sort of heat loss in the legs, which means surfers will have decreased force and power in their legs after just a few waves. This affects how well a surfer can pop to their feet and maneuver their board through sections of a wave.

A few years prior to this regional temperature study, Nessler and Newcomer published another paper on wetsuit design with a somewhat obvious takeaway: neoprene restricted a surfer’s ability to paddle. Using that study on kinesthetics, the Cal State researchers wrote in their thermodynamics paper that “the current findings suggest that upper body wetsuit design should be tailored more toward mobility while thermal insulation should be paramount over the lower body.”

Hurley responded positively and built a never before considered wetsuit: 4 millimeters in the legs, 3 millimeters over the lower belly and back, and 2 millimeters in the chest, upper back, and arms. In short, a suit that kept surfers warmer for longer and let them paddle more efficiently throughout the length of their sessions. It seemed like wetsuits were about to be revolutionized.

But then things went south. According to Newcomer, the company’s marketing department found it tricky to sell the science of the final product. Traditionally, wetsuits are named by their thickness. A 4/3-millimeter suit, for instance, is understood to mean that the thickest neoprene (4 millimeters) is wrapped around the core, while the thinnest neoprene (3 millimeters) covers the extremities. Since the new Hurley suit had the thickest neoprene in the legs, thinned as it reached the torso, then thinned some more in the chest and arms, it was confusing to use those traditional measurements. They ended up calling it . While the suit eventually reached customers and is still available today, Hurley kept the science in the smaller print. (Hurley did not respond to şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř’s request for comment, but the company has since changed the to say that its “premier wetsuit” is “designed with insight from the world’s top surfers and scientists at California State University at San Marcos” and “add[s] warmth where it’s needed, and eliminat[es] bulk where it’s not.”)

Then, in 2019, Nike sold Hurley. The new owners cleaned house, and nobody from Hurley reached out to Nessler and Newcomer after that. Most wetsuit makers continued to churn out the suits with the same design.

The two San Marcos professors didn’t give up. They continued to look at new designs and create experiments to explore what actually worked. Finally, in 2020, someone picked up their research again. After Hurley’s sale, Bruce Moore followed the company’s founder, Bob Hurley, to his new company, Kandui Holdings. Superstar surfer John John Florence also left Hurley after the sale, walking away from the biggest contract in surfing history. Instead of signing with another big-name brand, Florence partnered with Kandui and formed a new surf gear and apparel line called .

Moore hadn’t forgotten about Nessler and Newcomer’s research, and Florence Marine X applied the professors’ findings when designing the first Florence Marine X wetsuit, which went on sale last year. The first batch quickly sold out despite its $750 price tag. It’s the first suit to incorporate Nessler and Newcomer’s research on regional temperatures in the body since the Hurley Advantage Max 3/2 Plus, using 3 millimeters of neoprene on the legs and lower torso, while covering the arms, upper chest, and upper back with 2 millimeters of rubber.

“They work really well for me in the water,” Florence says. “They’re durable, warm, and comfortable, which is what I’m looking for.”

But even Florence Marine X’s suit simplifies the science in its literature and focuses more on the Japanese neoprene and craftsmanship. “There’s only so much the consumer can palate,” Moore says.

None of this is slowing down the professors. They’ve discussed future studies with Florence Marine X (the company is looking to use body scanner technology to design wetsuits); they’re completing yet to be published studies on how wetsuit thickness affects factors like short-term sprint paddling and oxygen consumption; and they’re preparing a study for peer-review that disproves the claim that graphene synthetic fleece linings—popular in many suits—result in higher skin temperatures when surfing compared to standard wetsuit synthetic fleece linings. Finally, the San Marcos lab is exploring claims about whether less-toxic materials can be a good substitute for neoprene. Their hope? That future wetsuit design decisions follow science instead of marketing claims.

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When Jack O'Neill died on June 1,Ěýthe surf industry lost one of itsĚýmost “affable pirates”. Never mind that he inventedĚýthe modern wetsuit:ĚýO'Neill alsoĚýinspiredĚýpeople to get into the ocean and he madeĚýit easy to do so. TheĚýfilm I Knew Jack O'Neill tells the story of how the legend came to be.Ěý

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I’ve tested hundreds of products over the past 11Ěýmonths, many of which were really, reallyĚýgood. But only a handful stood out as the year’s best, either because they totally rethought a category or because their design made them significantly better than the competition. What follows are eightĚýproducts that I think defined innovation in 2016.

VoormiĚýFallLine Jacket ($400)

Instead of sandwiching a waterproof membrane between two sheets of synthetic material, like most high-end three-layerĚýwinter shells, the features Voormi’s Core Construction technology, which weaves wool through theĚýwaterproof membrane. The result? You get anĚýouter layer that shrugs off snow but alsoĚýbreathes exceptionally well thanks to the wool, making it ideal for high-output winter activities. The wool is also softer than most synthetic materials, which helps the FallLine feel more like a sweater and less like a jacket.

Arc’teryx Procline Carbon Ski Mountaineering Boot ($1,000)

The offer a huge 75 degrees of flex in walk mode, but they also have a 35-degree side-to-side range of motion. That side-to-side movement helps you stay planted over your skis when your’re on a steep, sloping skin track. It also helps if you want to strap on crampons for a technical ascent on rock or ice (with the side-to-side motion, theseĚýfeel more like mountaineering boots and less like a pair of race boots). Don’t buy the Proclines if you want to drive big powder sticks. Do invest in them if you want to climb and ski all of Colorado’s 14ers.Ěý

Patagonia Yulex Wetsuits (Starting at $170)

This is the world’s . Neoprene is derived from fossil fuels. Yulex, on the other hand, is made from rubber harvested from Hevea trees on a Rainforest Alliance–certified plantation in Guatemala. The suits are then built in factories that run off solar power. Those two updates reduce Patagonia’s wetsuit-production carbon dioxideĚýemissions by up to 80 percent.Ěý

Bose QuietComfort 35 Wireless Headphones ($350)

Bose did three important things with . First, their noise-canceling technology is the best out there. The headphones eliminate any ambient soundsĚýbut also cut out the low hum that noise-canceling technology sometimes leaves behind. Second, the speakers inside are top-notch, with crisp highs and thumping lows. Finally, the wireless application is seamless. They immediately connect to my phone and have 20 hours of battery life. No other piece of gear has changed my productivity like these headphones. They allow me be completely zoned in and distraction-free while I write, either at home or at the local coffee shop.

Apple iPhone 7 Plus ($770)

The makes my list because there’s no better camera for adventurers who want to travel fast and light. The 12-megapixel sensor produces sharp images with rich colors that look stunning online and make great prints. The phone can shoot in RAW, which means you get larger images that are easier to tone and crop. And then there are the two lenses: the standard 28-millimeterĚýwith a fast f1.8 aperture, which works well for landscapes and in low light, and the 56-millimeter, which you want to use for portraits. I also suggest using the portrait mode, which blurs out the background. Finally, the phone is highly water resistant, so you don’t have to worry if you drop itĚýin the snow while skiing.

Hoka Speed Instinct Trail Running Shoes ($130)

With the , Hoka moved away from the ultracushioned design that made itĚýa running-shoe powerhouse. These shoesĚýhave a relatively neutral three-millimeterĚýheel-to-toe dropĚýbut still carry over many of Hoka’s other standout features, like a feathery light build (8.4 ouncesĚýfor the pair), an extremely breathable upper, a cushy heel, and denser forefoot.ĚýLike the best running shoes, they felt great and kept myĚýfeet happy and protected.

MSR Guardian Purifier ($350)

If you’re backpacking in the United States, you only need a purifier that removes bacteria and protozoa. But if you’re traveling overseas to a place where viruses in the water are a problem, you want the . It eliminates all three of these bugs and is the surest way to stay healthy without drinking terrible-tasting water. Bonus: the Guardian is self-cleaning,Ěýensuring you get at least 10,000 liters of clean water before it needs to be replaced.

Dagger Nomad Kayak ($1,200)

I’m a kayak geek, so this made my list.ĚýWhy? Because after 12 years of usingĚýthe same ultrapredictable, secure design, Dagger decided it was time to . I was skeptical of the update, but after a full spring and summer in the boat, I agree that it’s a much better design. What you get is the same predictability withĚýmore maneuverability andĚýspeed.

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It started with a foam chip the size of a Scrabble tile. In 2007, Patagonia, which had launched its wetsuits the year before, decided it no longer wanted to use petroleum-based neoprene—the industry standard. There were a few existing alternatives, such as limestone-derived geoprene, but none of these impressed the eco-conscious Ventura, California–based brand. So when , a natural-rubber company that had been making alternatives for people with latex allergies, got wind of Patagonia’s frustration, it baked up a plant-based squareĚýof rubber from Guatemalan hevea trees and sent it to Patagonia’s headquarters.

The wetsuit team liked the material, so itĚýbrought it to a traditional neoprene manufacturer to see if they could make suits out of the green rubber. Then they went back to Yulex to tweak the foam so it would work in a wetsuit.

Almost ten years later, the team succeeded. “It took 200 material trials to come up with a material that would meet or beat the current neoprene,” says John “Hub” Hubbard, who manages Patagonia’s wetsuit development. The new rubber needed to have the same stretch and strength as a petroleum-based product, hold up to sun and salt, and be ozone- and UV-resistant.

Patagonia finally released the this fall. Even more important, it also released the technology behind the rubber and the names of the factories that produced the suits. The company’s hope: to motivate other manufacturers to use fewer resource-intensive materials. “We knew from the beginning that we’re a very small player in the surf industry—there’s no way we’re going to disrupt that industry—but it was always our intention to invite other companies to use [the technology],” Hubbard says.

The basic idea is that by bringing sustainable materials to market in a broad way, everyone—the brands, the consumers, the planet—benefits. Sharing technology helps other companies avoid sinking years of time and money into product development. But it turns out (not surprisingly, really) that opening up your intellectual property, supply chain, and chemical usage is tricky, even in the close-knit, eco-minded outdoor industry. Competitive advantage comes from having tech other brands don’t, and some companies (Gore-Tex, for instance) live and die by their hold on their proprietary technology.

Open-sourcing gear technology doesn’t always work, and it’s not new. In the mid-1990s, Patagonia opened up its organic-cotton sourcing, but because it was more expensive and difficult than the traditional supply chain, it didn’t get much traction.ĚýIn 2010, Nike set up what it called the GreenXChange, a Creative Commons–style marketplace for intellectual property, with other large companies like Best Buy and DuPont. It fizzled from lack of participation.

But recently, some brands, including Patagonia and Nike, along with trade groups like the (OIA), have stepped up their calls for increased sharing and transparency—especially in places where open sourcing can lower the environmental impact of producing a product. They’re trying to emulate a few companies in the tech world—most recently Tesla—where opening up intellectual property is viewed as a way to improve the quality of an entire industry. And there are signs that it’s working.

Much of the talk about collaboration and openness started with the (SAC), which came out of the OIA in 2009. It saw multiple brands trying to shorten the same supply chains, all of which seemed like a waste of effort and resources. Plus, it thought the best methods for developing low-toxicity waterproofing should win out, and then get adopted as standard. The SAC’s initial goal was to come up with a sustainability ranking so that brands could benchmark the impacts of their products and practices against each other. It has slowly encouraged more companies to share what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Take Nike: The company opened up its materials sustainability index, which helps select fabrics based on their environmental footprints, on an app called Making. It’s not all altruistic: Nike hopes that greater demand will lead to greater and cheaper supply of these materials.Ěý

The SAC eventually developed the Higg Index—a tool for measuring impact and sharing practices that’s sort of like Tinder for manufacturing trade secrets. So far, dozens ofĚýbig outdoorĚýbrands,ĚýincludingĚýArc'teryx, Columbia, Brooks, Adidas, Lululemon, and New Balance,Ěýhave adopted the index.ĚýCompanies fill out modules that detail things like how they manufacture and package their products. Two brands, or a brand and a factory, can opt to share information with each other, or their information can be anonymously shared across all participating brands. In 2017, the SAC is planning to release a set of industry-wide benchmarks, based on what brands are now willing to share, says Betsy Blaisdell, vice president of the SAC.

Most other brands that have open-sourced their technology or processes have done so only if they’re at the top of their competitive set and aren’t going to disadvantage themselves. In March, as a part of World Water Day, Levi’s released its Water

To make sustainability work across the industry, Beth Jensen, director of sustainable business innovation at the OIA, says they’re trying to figure out how to promote sharing in ways that don’t undercut profitability or competitiveness and to come up with specific areas where the industry can improve. “We would like to explore less impactful solutions to DWR chemistry that have shorter carbon chains,” she says. “We’re also missing a lot of data on a lot of our issues, like sources of microplastics and microfibers in the waterways. We think that’s information that should be open.”

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Your next wetsuit might be furry, thanks to a new materialĚý. The stuff, which doesn’t have a name yet, is a sheet of rubberized hair that mimics the pelt of beavers and otters. The goal is to turn the material into a thin wetsuit that has an ultra-high warmth-to-weight ratio.

“There are basically two ways that mammals stay warm in cold water—blubber and fur,” says Peko Hosoi, the head of sports technology and education at MIT,Ěýand the lead engineer on the project. “Big animals like walruses and sea lions use blubber, which is thick and heavy and cumbersome. But small, more agile animals like beavers and sea otters use fur, which actually holds onto pockets of air when they’re diving in and out of water. That air trapped between the hair follicles works as insulation for the animal.”

Hosoi says surfing seemed like the perfect application because the material could be made thinner than a traditional neoprene wetsuit, freeing up the surfer to be more agile on the wave. The rubber hairs continue to trap air even out of the water, so surfers can stay warm while waiting for waves.

Here’s how it works: three-millimeter polydimethylsiloxan (PDMS) rubber hairs are attached to the outside of a thin rubber base layer. As the fibers meet the water, the weight of the liquid pushes air into the space between the hairs, which are about one millimeter apart. That pressureĚýcreates tiny air pockets. The thermal conductivity of air is two to five times smaller than that of rubber, meaning it takes that much longer for your body heat to pass through. As a result, Hosoi believes they’ll be able to make a wetsuit that offers the same insulative properties while being two to five times thinner than your standard suit.

As soon as the news was announced, the surfing world took note. Hosoi has already received emails from surfers asking where they can get their hands onĚýthe new material. Hub Hubbard, the wetsuit developer at Patagonia who helped the company develop its new plant-based wetsuit material, is also watching to see where it goes. He says wetsuit thermal liners, which are made of anything from merino wool to space-age fibers with infrared technology, have reduced wetsuit thickness by up to one millimeter while retaining the same level of warmth. But the idea of a beaver-inspired wetsuit that uses air as an insulator could be revolutionary.

“It’s super interesting,” Hubbard says. “Our innovation team has played around with biomimicry on other projects, and I think there’s potential with this kind of thing. Whether they can make a suit that can withstand the turbulence of being in surf is the real question. I’m really hopeful it works out.“

We still have a few years before you see a hairy wetsuit on the rack in your local surf shop, however. The next step for Hosoi and her team at MIT is to figure out how to manufacture the material on a scale that could be useful and cost effective for wetsuit companies. As for what these furry wetsuits might look like, Hosoi says they won’t look much different than your traditional suit. “It’s made of very small follicles in a highly controlled pattern, so it’s not going to look like Cookie Monster is out there surfing,” she says.

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Surfers come in all shapes and sizes. Wetsuits do not.Ěý

While a small range in sizing might not make or break performance for most garments, the fit of a wetsuit requires precision. Too big and you’ll be chilly, as water cycles in and out. Too small and you’ll limit your range of motion—or worse, split a seam in the lineup. Ěý

Custom suits are cost prohibitive for most surfers, costing up to twice as much as their off-the-rack counterparts, but Los Angeles-based is changing that. The brand utilizes the latest Computed-Aided Design (CAD) production techniques to reduce the cost of made to order wetsuits without skimping on quality.

Here’s how it works. Carapace’s sleek measurement guide walks customers through 12 essential measurements for the suit. Instructional videos ensure the most accurate numbers and cut down on the likelihood of error in measuring.ĚýOnce you submit your data, Carapace’s software compiles the proportions to create a unique pattern. This algorithm speeds up the production process, keeping costs down. After the pattern is drawn and cut, each suit receives careful individual treatment. Every panel is double-glued and each seam is taped by hand— a process that takes up to five hours for one suit.

The brand offers both surfing and diving-specific wetsuits. Surfing wetsuits are available in various thicknesses in two types of neoprene: the highly water-repellant premium ($495) and the fleece/spandex combination ($395). From measurement to delivery, Carapace Wetsuits take around three weeks and come with a one-year warranty.

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A former commercial fisherman widely credited with inventing the neoprene wetsuit. The attribution is incorrect—most historians now believe California physicist came up with it. (See Wetsuit.) But no one did a better job of making the wetsuit cool than Denver native O’Neill, a water-loving businessman who opened his first surf shop near San Francisco in 1952. O’Neill offered essential additions, including a stretchy nylon laminated onto the neoprene. More crucially, he popularized the image of the wetsuit-clad surfer, including one memorable ad that read “It’s Always Summer on the Inside” and featured a topless woman pulling on one of his suits. “He was a bearded one-eyed NorCal Don Draper,” says Matt Warshaw, author of .

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An insulating garment that allows individuals to spend more time in cold water. It has been especially influential in the history of scuba diving and surfing. “Take away the wetsuit and you’ve lopped off 70 percent of the places where people surf and 90 percent of the hours they can put in,” says Matt Warshaw, who runs the website .

The first wetsuit was created in the 1950s out of neoprene, an invention some attribute to surfer Jack O’Neill and others to University of California at Berkeley physicist . The new creation was surprisingly slow to catch on. “Back then there was a machismo attached to surfing. You went out there, froze, lit some tires on the beach to get warm, and did it all again,” says Warshaw. “The sport was for tough guys. If you wore a wetsuit, you were mocked for being a sissy.” According to legend, that all changed when surfer and diver enlisted board manufacturers to outfit their athletes in the new neoprene suits, branded with company logos. A week later, the best surfers in California were all wearing them. The suit has also been useful in activities like kite-boarding and triathlon, allowing individuals to work in open water in varied seasons.

Over time, designs have become more diverse, ranging from one-millimeter-thick, torso-only versions (called shorties) to ten-millimeter-thick, full-body suits for submersion in polar seas. Though most suits are still made with neoprene, companies like are working with more eco-friendly materials—like , derived from the guayule plant—that don’t rely on petroleum.

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In the outdoor world, the word “extreme” has been overused to the point of being laughably cliche. That said, there are products that merit the title. Take the gear Eric Larsen schleps with him on his polar expeditions, where he faces negative-50-degree temperatures, open water, and powerful winds. The equipment he carries with him—designed to save his life—needs to be as extreme as the conditions.

Whether you’re gearing up for a trip to Antarctica or just interested in what technology is capable of, here are five of the warmest, strongest, most insane pieces of gear on the market.

Stearns I950 ThermaShield 24+ Drysuit ($1,500)

Most immersion suits are certified by the U.S. Coast Guard to keep the wearer warm for up to six hours. Stearns, on the other hand, claims its Ěýwill keep a person alive in freezing water for more than 24 hours.

The company managed this feat thanks to a new innovation that circulates the swimmer’s breath throughout the suit, which helps keep her extremities and core warm, even in 32-degree water. The suit looks bombproof, with design details such as integrated rubber boots (rather than just neoprene), removable gloves, and an inflatable pillow for in-water neck support.

Helly Hansen CTCP Winter Felt Pack Boots ($250)

You probably own, or have at least heard of, waterproof hiking boots. Well, these beasts go well beyond that, with a carbone upper that’s resistant to oil, diesel, and other chemicals. Oh yeah, they’re also resistant to electric shock. The are rated to negative-100 degrees Fahrenheit thanks to 400 grams of insulation in the body and an insole with a built-in frost plug.

Unless you work in an Alaskan oil field or as a Canadian construction worker, you likely don’t need such a burly boot. But it would make one hell of an upgrade to your footwear closet.

Nemo Canon Down Sleeping Bag ($1,049)

With a negative-40-degree temperature rating thanks to its 850-fill-power down, the is one of the warmest bags you can buy. I had the pleasure of sleeping in the Canon (which costs about as much as one of my mortgage payments) without a tent on a single-digit night in the Sierra Mountains. I promptly started sweating bullets.

Thankfully, the Canon has two large zippers that run from the chest to the knees (Nemo calls these regulating thermo gills) that I was able to adjust to dump heat. The stovepipe tunnel hood kept my nose from getting frostbite but still gave me enough breathing room that I didn’t feel claustrophobic.

Arc’Teryx Theta SVX Jacket ($750)

The , with its 80-denier face fabric, is built from the toughest Gore-Tex material on the market. On top of being extremely durable, the jacket was designed for nasty alpine conditions thanks to its brimmed hood, tall collar, and thigh-length cut. It’s expensive (half again as much as our 2015 Gear of the Year–winning shell from The North Face), but it should last you the rest of your life.

MSR XGK EX Stove ($160)

Polar explorer Larsen recently relied on the during a 52-day expedition where temperatures regularly dipped below negative-40 degrees Fahrenheit. “We used it for five hours per day, every day, and did not have a single problem,” Larsen says. The XGK is so burly and so easy to fix that he stopped bringing a backup stove on expeditions. Why carry the extra weight when one device works 100 percent of the time? “You can throw it against a wall, run over it with a semi truck, then cook your dinner on it,” Larsen says. “It is easily my most reliable piece of gear.”

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You can scrape together gear from your garage to make a last-minute Halloween costume, but don't go for the standard—and boring—surfer or kayaker. You are better and more creative than that. With a few clever additions and some theatrics, you can turn your equipment into an award-winning Halloween costume. Here are five suggestions to get started.

Wetsuit Batman

You'll need a Batman mask, cape, and a wetsuit. You can make the first two items with material from a craft store, but if you're short on time, buy a children's Batman outfit for $20 and just use the mask and belt. While any form-fitting black base layer will work, the wetsuit looks like the bulletproof material Batman would use. Plus, it makes your pecs look good. Bonus: if you have a hydration belt you don't mind painting black and yellow, you can fill the bottles with booze.

'80s Hot Dog Skier

You can dress as a skier only if there's lots of neon and maybe a jumpsuit involved. A wig isn't necessary, but it helps tie the costume together. If you don't have a wig, you can make do with bright colors, sketchy facial hair, and a copious number of quotes from the 1984 hit . Show up with a shot skiĚýfor bonus points.

Bivvy Sack Fanta Can

Last year, ultrarunning legend Jenn Shelton dressed up as to celebrate Halloween in Durango, Colorado. She used an orange emergency bivy sack as the body, while the lid was made from cardboard and aluminum attached to a helmet. “It was 10 degrees out so it was the best costume: it was so warm,” Shelton says. Caution: this costume limits your ability to see. “I walked into a woman and she pushed me,” says Shelton. Thankfully a group of people walking by came to her aid, yelling, “Nobody pushes orange soda!” It was a validating moment for the ultrarunner.Ěý

Jumpsuit Superhero

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř's Executive Editor Sam Moulton and his wife Nicole built their superhero costumes from baselayers last Halloween. “We both had ,” Moulton wrote in an email. “That was the inspiration, as they were both purple and lavender. Then I got to work—went to JoAnn's and got some fabric glue and fabric to make the belt, the logo on the chest, and the boots.” They finished the ensemble with elf ears from Party City.

Sleeping Bag Larvae with Emerging Butterfly

All you need is a sleeping bag, butterfly wings, and some acting skills. Oh yeah, and a willing partner to deliver you to the party inside a zipped-up mummy bag. Emerge—with wings on—at your own pace. Just keep track of what happens in the sleeping bag after you've completed the metamorphosis.

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