Safety Gloves are an essential part of PPE (personal protective equipment) and protect your hands from several possible dangers and injuries. Protective safety gloves will protect your hands from a range of risks and dangers from anything as minor as cutting to more serious injuries such as losing a finger. Here at Bodyguard Workwear we take the safety gloves standards very seriously and that’s why with each pair of gloves including our own made Bodyguard Workwear gloves and other branded gloves such as UVEX and Samurai we make sure they pass the standards for their use and how you would use them in the work environment, depending on their use usually depends on what materials the glove is made from.

Safety Gloves standard come in levels. Knowing these levels are key to choosing what type of glove you need to what type of work environment you work on. For example, if you would need a glove that protects from molten damage you would need a glove that fits into the EN407 section and this is explained in the safety gloves standards chat by performance levels. This is a chart that defines how much protection you gain with each type of glove and what its best protected by. Hazards are expressed by this chart by a performance level by the glove. Each level representing a performance against a specific hazard.

Gloves worn to protect the user from potentially life-threatening risks must be independently tested by an approved the European Standard. A summary of the main glove standards is matched in 5 levels which consist of different protection options of what the glove would protect you from.

The Levels are:

Gloves that meet the EN420 Standards are typically your common safety glove to protect your hand from risk of injury when working on a construction site for example. These protective gloves should protect from minimal risks such as protecting from garden thorns/stings, blunt knife cuts and light duty damage to the glove.

Gloves that meet standards to protect against chemicals and micro-organisms, the glove needs to be liquid proof before it can even attempt to meet the EN374 standards, but yet does not need to always act as protection from liquids. It can also act as a sponge in a sense to not retract but to just soak chemical liquids without allowing it to break through the glove to cause harm to the hand. Hazardous liquid is not looking likely to meet skin wearing gloves under this category unless there is already damage to the glove such as a pinehole or imperfection in the material in the glove for hazardous liquids to seep though. But at Bodyguard Workwear we can make a certain guarantee that this will not happen with any of our gloves that follow the EN374 guideline to protect from chemicals.

Gloves that protect from physical and mechanical damages and harm when working with machinery. This covers protection from physical injury to the hand such as abrasion, blade cuts, punctures and tearing of the glove and skin, all these points (Abrasion resistance, blade cut resistance, tear resistance and puncture resistance) are all based on the number of cycles to abrade, cut, tear or pierce the glove and this is tested before sold or to be used for wearers that work in environments where they can face these dangers.

Gloves that protect against heat and fire with thermal performance. There are six key performances the EN407 glove will protect from. These being Flammability resistant which is when a glove is lit with gas flames and held against such material/gas for 15 seconds without reacting to damage. Another is contact heat resistant, which allows a glove to be exposed to temperatures between +100 Degrees to +500 Degrees for a length of time that is calculated by each +10 Degrees. 15 seconds is usually recommended before the glove would start to react to the heat. The third one is convective heat resistant, which is allows the glove to be protected for the heat of a gas flame for example to increase the temperature of the gloves inside materials to protect the skin and hand. Finally, the last two performances are, resistant to small splashes of molten metal/rock and resistant to large quantities molten metal/rocks. The last two being very similar in protection of can cope with molten metal or rock heat which is usually an increased temperature from +40 degrees between inside and outside the glove that would occur for the case of it being splashes or small quantities the larger quantities could handle molten metal being poured over the glove and this is measured by how much the glove could take up to from 40 degrees upwards.

Gloves that protect against convective and contact colds from below -50 Degrees and will protect against cold in performance levels, like the thermal gloves. The three key performances a glove needs to offer to meet the standards of EN511 are resistance to convective cold which is based on the thermal insulation of the glove and is measured on how much cold a glove can withstand without becoming painful to the hand or harming the hand in anyway. Secondly the resistance to contact cold which is direct cold temperatures to the glove. Finally, the penetration to cold waters. All gloves must have performance level to penetrate water to meet the EN511 standards.

Gloves need to protect against ioning radiation and radioactive contamination. The gloves need to protect from radioactive contamination and needs to be liquid proof to meet the standards of EN421. For gloves used in containment enclosures, the glove will need to take a pressure leak test. Also, the glove needs to protect from ionising radiation and the glove needs to contain amount of lead or metal that will match the strength.