Bluegrass Golden Eye helmet

The Golden Eye was introduced to the market last year as Bluegrass’s first offering in the all-mountain helmet market. It’s designed with more coverage and protection in mind for those big mountain descent or enduro (sorry…) situations.

There’s a distinctive, almost 90° corner around the top of the ears where the helmet drops low around the back of the skull, offering great protection. This cut-out provides room for your ears, a platform for goggle straps and didn’t interfere with glasses.

All this coverage doesn’t massively affect your temperature. Bluegrass has done a very admirable job of ventilating, with 13 vents and deep internal channels to get the cool air flowing through. Other neat little features to aid temperature control are the ventilated straps (the centre of the strap has small slits in) and a front gel pad, which is very comfortable and provides more padding on the forehead.

Putting the Golden Eye on instantly gave me a boost in confidence. I felt it would definitely help protect my precious brain and good looks in a crash. I’ve used it as my main race helmet and opted to wear it in situations where I considered the risk of crashing to be increased thanks to riding at the edge of my limits. It stayed in place during an over-the-bars, head-first landing and I’m very impressed in the overall security provided.

Even if Chipps isn’t going to embrace the goggles and open helmet look, the Golden Eye has a large goggle lock that holds your strap firmly and stops it from lifting at the back. The adjustable motocross-style peak has plenty of space under it to fit a goggle strap when you want to flip them round and run them backwards on climbs too. For me the only downside to the Golden Eye is that I could sometimes feel the inner edge of the rear cradle pressing on my head.

Overall: A well-thought-out helmet, with good coverage, ventilation and most importantly protection at a pretty reasonable price. For my wardrobe I’d prefer one of the other colours though.