Buy a full-face. If you ride mostly at highway speed, or in traffic, or in cold or wet weather, or you have no strong reason to want your face in the wind, the full-face is the better helmet and the AGV K6 S is our pick — DOT plus ECE 22.06, the only standard here that tested rotational impact, in the lightest full-face we rank. That is the verdict and we are not going to bury it. An open-face helmet protects your skull and leaves your jaw, chin, cheeks and eyes exposed to whatever you hit.
And yet the open-face is the most-read ranking on this site, because the riders who want one have real reasons. Low-speed city riding where you talk to people at every light. Cruiser riding where an upright position puts the wind on your chest rather than your chin. Heat. Claustrophobia, which is not a joke — a rider who takes a full-face off in traffic is wearing nothing. Vision and hearing that genuinely are less obstructed. If you are that rider, the right answer is the best-certified open-face you can get, and three of them are ranked below.
What this page does notdo is put a number on how much safety the chin bar buys. There is a widely-quoted statistic about the share of helmet impacts that land on the chin, and we are not repeating it, because every version we can find traces back to a 1980s European study we cannot read in primary form. We would rather tell you the mechanism and be honest about the measurement gap — see our methodology. Everything factual below about these six helmets is the certification, shell and weight their maker publishes, on a dated visit.
The two helmets, side by side
| What you care about | Full-face | Open-face (3/4) |
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| Coverage | Skull, jaw, chin and face, behind a shield that is part of the certified assembly | Skull, ears and back of the head. Jaw, chin and face open |
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| Certification available | DOT, and ECE 22.06 or SNELL on better models — the strongest cert pairs on the market are all full-face | DOT, routinely. ECE on some. SNELL on effectively none in this category |
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| Wind noise | Lower, and controllable — sealing and a neck roll are what make a helmet quiet | Higher and unsealable. Turbulence around an open chin is loud at any real speed |
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| Weight | Heavier for the same shell material — there is more helmet | Lighter, usually noticeably so |
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| Heat and airflow | Vent-dependent. A mesh jacket does more for you than an extra helmet vent | Unbeatable below about 30 mph; irrelevant above it |
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| Glasses | Awkward — arms have to thread past the cheek pads. Some models cut channels for them | Easy. This is a genuine, under-rated advantage of a 3/4 helmet |
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| Weather | Rain, cold, grit and insects all stop at the shield | All of it reaches your face. Rain at 60 mph genuinely hurts |
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| Intercoms | Best case — a sealed shell is a better acoustic environment for speakers and a boom mic | Workable with a wired boom mic; wind noise is the limiting factor |
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What the certification does and does not tell you
This is the part that trips people up. DOT FMVSS 218 certifies open-face helmets. It is a real certification and a 3/4 helmet carrying it is a legal, tested helmet — tested for the area it covers. The standard does not require a chin bar, so a helmet without one can pass it completely honestly. A DOT sticker on an open-face is not a loophole; it just is not a statement about your jaw.
Where the two types genuinely diverge is at the top of the market. The strongest certification pairs you can buy — DOT plus SNELL, DOT plus ECE 22.06 — are almost entirely full-face territory, because Snell’s protocol and the UNECE regulation both involve tests that assume a chin bar is there. If you want the most-tested helmet available, the type decision is already made for you. Our safest-helmets ranking works through that in full, and our certification guide explains each mark.
One sub-category deserves a warning. A convertible helmet with a removable chin bar is usually certified only in one configuration, and often the chin bar itself carries no rating at all. The Bell Broozer in our registry is exactly this: DOT, with a removable chin bar that is unrated. Treat a detachable chin bar as wind protection, not as impact protection, unless the maker publishes a rating for it — which is different from a modular helmet with a dual P/J homologation, covered in modular versus full-face.
Who should actually buy the open-face
- Cruiser and city riders at low speed.An upright riding position and 35 mph change the wind problem entirely. If your riding is errands, short hops and a bike night, the open-face’s advantages are real and its biggest weakness — speed — is not in play. Our cruiser helmet ranking covers both types for that riding position.
- Riders who wear glasses. Threading spectacle arms past the cheek pads of a full-face is the single most common reason we see people give up on one. An open-face removes the problem completely. If you would rather solve it inside a full-face, that ranking exists too.
- Riders who cannot tolerate a full-face. If a closed helmet makes you panic, you will ride without one. A certified 3/4 helmet you will actually wear beats a SNELL-rated full-face in the garage, and that is not a compromise we are embarrassed to recommend.
- Hot-climate short-distance riding.With the caveat that above about 30 mph the airflow advantage disappears and the fatigue from noise and buffeting takes over. Our hot-weather gear guide argues that the jacket, not the helmet, is where heat is really won.
If you buy the open-face, buy these three things with it
- Eye protection you can rely on.A 3/4 helmet with a short peak and no shield puts your eyes in the wind, and grit at speed is a crash risk, not an annoyance. Either buy a model with a full face shield or a drop-down visor — the HJC i31 above has an internal sun visor as well — or ride in proper goggles. Sunglasses are not it.
- Earplugs. Open-face wind noise is not fixable by helmet choice. Our earplugs guide covers what the ratings mean.
- Something over your face in cold weather.A balaclava or a neck tube is the difference between a 45 F morning being fine and being unrideable. See cold-weather gear.
How we ranked these six
- The AGV K6 S leads because it answers the whole page. DOT plus ECE 22.06 by name, a carbon-aramid shell, and the lightest full-face in our registry — which removes the one honest weight advantage an open-face has.
- The Shoei RF-1400 is the certification pick.DOT plus SNELL M2020D on a hand-laid AIM+ shell at about 1,640 g, and quiet with it. If you want the most-tested road helmet rather than the lightest, this is it.
- The HJC C10 is the budget full-face. DOT, a polycarbonate shell and a price that undercuts most open-faces, which matters: cost is not a reason to skip the chin bar. More in our budget ranking.
- The Bell Custom 500 is the best open-face here because of something that has nothing to do with styling: five shell sizes. A small head in a one-shell helmet wears an oversized shell packed out with foam, and five shells means the helmet is actually sized to you. Full ranking on our open-face page.
- The HJC i31 is the practical open-face. DOT with a drop-down internal sun visor, which solves the eye-protection and low-sun problems a bare 3/4 helmet creates. See helmets with a sun visor for the mechanism and its costs.
- The TORC T-50 is the cheap one that is still certified. DOT FMVSS 218 at the bottom of the market. It is here so that nobody reading this page concludes the only affordable open-face is an uncertified novelty lid — those exist, and our guide to spotting a fake helmet is about exactly that market.
