ABSTRACT Sunglasses provide essential protection against ultraviolet radiation, reduce glare, and can also enhance color contrast and color rendition. However, the sunglass industry currently lacks validated image‐based methods to characterize the perceptual impact of such filters. This study develops a comprehensive method to simulate sunglass‐filtered color vision using hyperspectral imaging and the image color appearance model (iCAM06). A psychophysical evaluation of 10 sunglasses filters with varying chromaticities under haploscopic viewing conditions confirmed that iCAM06 with CAT02 provides accurate color reproduction. Alternative nonlinear chromatic adaptation transforms (CAT97 and one of its recently proposed modifications) did not improve accuracy and frequently reduced average ratings for both chromatic and classic filters. These results thus validate the robustness of iCAM06 for accurate simulation of both filtered and unfiltered images.