Reading the six-character shield, position by position
A glove marking is not one number. It’s six independent test results, and misreading any one of them is how EHS teams under protect a task while believing they’ve covered it.
The hook: one shield, six different questions
Two gloves sit on a shelf. One is marked 4544. The other is marked 4X44FP. Ask a room full of buyers which offers stronger cut protection and most will guess wrong — because both codes look similar, and neither buyer is reading past the first digit.
That’s the actual risk in EN 388:2016+A1:2018. The standard doesn’t hand out a single “cut score” — it reports six separate outcomes (abrasion, cut, tear, puncture, a second cut result, and an optional impact result) stamped as one shield so it fits on a label. Treat it as one number and you can hand out a glove that’s excellent against abrasion and marginal against the puncture hazard actually on the task. The fix is reading six positions, not one.
The decode: what each position actually tests
| Position | Hazard | Method | Scale |
| 1 — Abrasion | Surface wear from repeated rubbing | Martindale machine, 180-grit abrasive, cycles to hole-through | 1–4 |
| 2 — Cut (Coup test) | A blade drawn back and forth under light load | Rotating-blade “coupe” test | 1–5, or X |
| 3 — Tear | Force needed to propagate a tear through a slit specimen | Tensile tear-propagation test | 1–4 |
| 4 — Puncture | Resistance to a single sharp point | Static force, steel probe | 1–4 |
| 5 — Cut (TDM test) | A single straight cut under rising force | ISO 13997 Tomodynamometer (TDM-100), fresh blade per cut | A–F |
| 6 — Impact (optional) | Blunt-force absorption at knuckles / back of hand | EN 13594 method — 2.5 kg striker, 5 J impact | P or absent |
Three literacy points buyers routinely miss:
Position 2 can read “X” — and that’s not a red flag. The coup test spins a blade across the material under light load. On high-
performance liner materials, the blade can dull before the test finishes, which makes the result unreliable rather than genuinely high. When that happens, the standard marks position 2 as X (“not applicable”) and defers to position 5 — the TDM letter — as the real cut number. X does not mean untested-and-unsafe. It means the more rigorous test governs instead.
X and 0 are opposites, not siblings. X means the test wasn’t applicable to this material. 0 means the test was run and the glove didn’t clear the minimum for Level 1. Reading a 0 as “not tested” is the second-most common misread on this label — it’s the opposite: 0 is a documented failure to meet the threshold, not an absence of data.
Position 6 is opt-in, not implied. Impact protection borrows the EN 13594 motorcycle-glove method — a 2.5 kg striker delivering 5 joules to the knuckle/back-of-hand area, passing at a mean transmitted force at or below 7.0 kilonewtons (kN). A glove earns P only if it was submitted for that specific test. No P doesn’t mean a glove fails impact — it means impact wasn’t claimed. Cut and impact are unrelated tests; a high cut letter says nothing about knuckle protection.
What changed in 2016+A1:2018
The 2003 edition tested four things — abrasion, cut, tear, puncture — as a four-digit code (a legacy marking like 4544 belongs to that era). Two additions define the current standard: the TDM cut test (position 5, A–F), added because the coup test alone couldn’t reliably rank the highest-performance materials without dulling its own blade, and an optional impact test (position 6, P), added for gloves marketed with back-of-hand protection. The 2018 amendment (+A1:2018) tightened the abrasion-test documentation without changing its 1–4 scale. A modern six-character code and a legacy four-digit code aren’t directly comparable — the newer one measures more, and measures the hardest hazard (cut) more rigorously.
Reading a real glove: ST-9080
STEGO’s SHELL Series ST-9080 is a useful literacy example because its public marking carries three of the points above at once. Its Article Data Sheet lists EN 388:2016+A1:2018 — 4X44FP:
4 abrasion — top of the 1–4 band X coup test — not applicable; consistent with a liner built from high-performance fiber (the ADS names HPPE and glass fiber in the public materials line), which is exactly the material class this test struggles to rate reliably 4 tear, 4 puncture — top of their respective 1–4 bands F TDM cut — top of the A–F band, the number that actually governs this glove’s cut claim P impact — passed the optional EN 13594 test
Read as “4544,” this code looks unremarkable. Read correctly, it’s a glove that cleared the top band on four independent hazards plus the impact test — the X simply confirms the coup method wasn’t the right tool for this material class.
Practical takeaways for an EHS selection review
- Ignore the first two digits as your headline number. For any glove with a performance liner, the letter at position 5 (TDM) is the reliable cut figure — check it before comparing gloves on “cut level.”
- Never compare a four-digit legacy code to a six-character current one. They’re measuring different things; a side-by-side “level” comparison across editions is not valid.
- Match every position to the actual task hazard, not just the highest number on the shield. A glove with a top cut letter can still carry a low puncture score — verify the position that maps to your specific exposure.
- Treat “P” as a separate purchasing requirement. If knuckle or back-of-hand impact is part of the job, confirm P is present — don’t assume a high cut rating implies impact coverage.
Where STEGO fits
STEGO publishes the full six-character EN 388:2016+A1:2018 marking on every hand-protection Article Data Sheet — no position hidden, no digit rounded up. That’s downstream of how the gloves get built: STEGO calls its development process “Decomposition of Risk” — starting from the hazard, not the marketing claim — and every SHELL Series and TEGX glove is engineered against the specific exposures it’s rated for. Reading the shield correctly is step one. What’s underneath a shield that reads well is worth asking any supplier about.
