There are plenty of scratch-resistant, hydrophobic coatings without anti-reflective properties that may be more appropriate for the frontside of sunglasses. I'm a huge fan of Crizal SunShield, which is essentially Crizal Avance on the back and the Avance top-coat on the front. Xperio lenses have, as I understand it, the same AR/SRC properties as SunShield.
I'm very leery of putting an AR coating on the front side of sunglass lenses. Isn't the whole point of a sunglass lens, to oversimplify things, to increase a lens's opacity from the outside in? Doesn't putting an AR coating on the front negate some of that benefit? Isn't that why we put mirror coatings, essentially an anti-anti-reflective treatment, on the front? And, if it was optically beneficial to put an AR coating on the front side of sunglass lenses, don't you imagine sunglass specialist companies such as Maui Jim, Serengeti, Costa del Mar, Rudy Project, and Oakley, who pride themselves in marketing the optics of their lenses, would be all over it as a way to make more money?
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