What brand of gloves do you prefer? - (May/12/2014 )

Just like the title says, what's your preferred brand of gloves?

I ordered some extra thick, extended cuff nitrile gloves from Microflex because I'm working with highly infectious, potentially lethal parasites. My impression with Microflex so far... Their gloves are crap. These gloves frequently tear and about 10-20% have holes in them right out fo the box. I've been working with infectious stage parasites and the webbing between the thumb and forefinger just splits in half. I've started wearing a pair of HighFive brand normal lab gloves under them to prevent having to worry about infection.

I use microflex when handling more infectious materials and I use distinct gloves when performing non hazardous work. Make sure you are using the gloves before the printed expiration date. If the webbing keeps ripping, consider using the next biggest glove size.

I don't know about the quality of nitrile gloves - maybe it's better in general - but with the normal yellow latex gloves we regularly had a few boxes within the shipment of which the gloves were bad quality, sticking together initially, ripping more often and with annoying "humps". They were from Blossom. Always it was just some of the boxes that were completely annoying !

There's no expiration date printed on these, just a manufacture date and a lot number. And I don't think going a size up is possible since I'm already using their 2XL gloves (having large hands limits your selection significantly when it comes to buying gloves). That's the largest I've seen. I'll probably opt for HighFive's 8 mil extended cuff gloves, as I haven't had any problems with that brand so far.

I've tried contacting Microflex via email about the quality issues and received no reply.

Well huh. After another rip in a glove today I was fed up and decided to give Microflex a call. They actually seemed legitimately concerned about the quality issue. They're sending a replacement case and want me to ship back what's left of the old case so their QA people can check it out. That's some pretty solid customer service. Hopefully the new case is better.

Latex gloves have a definite lifetime, so if you get an old batch, they will not work. It appears to be oxygen sensitivity, since the top few gloves in a box are often bad. Nitrile seems to be much less sensitive to this issue.

we use high five cobalt and tnt blue and haven't had the problems you describe.