I feel a bit like Goldilocks, finding a sun hat that is just right has proved more difficult than you’d imagine.

You need experience to buy anything. I think that’s why we make so many shopping mistakes.

I remember going to a furniture store to buy a sofa in my twenties. It turned out to be the most uncomfortable thing I’d ever sat on. It took three more sofa purchases before I finally got it right. Sofa number four has endured, had the slip covers changed twice but it took experience, the right size, the right cushion depth, the right height back, the right fill to ensure the perfect slothing experience.

I say this because buying a floppy hat has proved to present similar challenges. I know comparing a sofa purchase to a wide brim hat is perhaps unlikely but they have presented similar challenges.

A hat on holiday is so much more than a simple fashion accessory, it’s not like a pair of shoes you wear every day and is wore to serve specific purposes. But being an item you don’t wear every day it needs certain specific engineering and dimensions to ensure the perfect one is purchased.

I’ve made a few mistakes as you can tell driven by desire and aesthetics not practicality.

So I’ve devised my list of requirements, pit falls and after long and drawn out hat research, the companies I have looked at include , Pardo Hats, Lock and Co (very expensive), San Diego Hat Company, Gladys Tamez, Eugenia Kim (more a proper milliner than a sun hat company) Eric Javits, (well known British Milliner) Herald and Heart, (the people who made the famous Andie McDowal Four Weddings and a Funeral Hat) Rachel Trevor Morgan, Philip Somerville and Amor y mezcal

Some might say I am a little bit hat obsessed. I dye my hair to I have to protect it from the sun to stop it going orange.

I’ve bought a few high st hats and cheaper hats online in the past, I even bought one from Free People I thought would do the job but the number one problem with a wide brim hat is the floppy brim.

A floppy brim without any structure or what I like to call “modablity” is completely useless. When you wear it, it flops down covers your eyes and you cannot see where you are going.

The brim needs to be at least 6 inches from the crown to the edge if you want complete coverage of your face for sunbathing and shade for reading.

Buying a hat online can be precarious when it comes to fit, hats sized S, M and L as opposed to proper hat sizes 63/4, 7, 71/2, tend to fit smaller than hats that are a little bit more expensive. And you have to separate the hat makers who produce posh hats for weddings and events like Ascot and Henley, and hat makers who produce more functional hats for hiking or the beach.

My recommendation is find a hat that fits you really comfortably, measure the inner circumference and then measure with a piece of string the circumference of your head from your forehead above your ears and around the widest part of head at the back, with both these measurements you’ll be able to ensure any hat you buy online will actually fit.

Two hats I purchased recently, one a bucket hat I actually tried on in a shop and one a gift Grant size XL both had to be given away because they ended up being two big and didn’t provide the wider brim needed for shade whilst sunbathing. The Gant XL was particularly large. My head measures 58cm, on the larger side but it was still too big for me.

I have bought a Monday straw beach hat which was on the expensive side, over £100, it’s a size M and it does fit me pretty well so this is the best purchase to date.

I have hat to sell four other hats on EBay and send one other back during this process, for various reasons, brim too floppy or not wide enough, wrong size or not foldable.

This is something else to consider when buying a hat, if you want to pack it, it has to be foldable. I am not the type to wear my sun hat in the airport.

After all the research and a number of inexpensive mistakes, I usually try to buy recycled I have found one company in America where my next hat is coming from, The San Diego Hat Company. I have actually seen and tried on one of their hats at a vintage fair, I just didn’t buy it immediately and when I went back to get it, someone else had already beaten me to it. Fortunately I remembered who made it.

I have been in touch with the company and they have been brilliant. So if you are a first time buyer looking for a dramatic wide brim hat for the sun, lounging, reading, that’s foldable with a mold able brim that isn’t going to cost you as much as a sofa, he he, the San Diego Hat Company hats are spectacular and they ship worldwide.