HIPER releases 30 new helmet ratings and moves from stars to medals

HIPER has released ratings for 30 cycle helmets, tested on its new production headform, and alongside this has moved from a five-star scale to a medal system — Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond — paired with a Protection Score out of 100. Every helmet on the site still passes the safety standard it’s sold under; stars didn’t communicate that well, making a two-star helmet look like a poor product even though it meets the legal minimum. The medal gives a quick read of overall protection, while the score distinguishes helmets within the same medal band.

The underlying test is unchanged: helmets are dropped onto a 45° angled anvil at 6.5 m/s, at four impact locations with three repeats each, weighted by how often each part of the head is hit in real cyclist crashes. What has changed is the headform — this new cohort of 30 ratings uses the production headform built to the EN 17950 standard, rather than the prototype used for the first, 2024 cohort of 30 helmets. Because the two headforms aren’t directly comparable, the original 2024 star ratings remain published separately in their original format.

The new medal system follows a September 2026 workshop where HEAD Lab brought together helmet brands, retailers and cyclists to agree the format together. Medal boundaries are fixed rather than relative, so a helmet’s rating never depends on which other helmets happen to be tested alongside it, and the thresholds are expected to hold for several years.