Bicycle Helmets and Nose Protection
Summary: Standard bicycle helmets are not designed to protect your nose, chin or teeth. Downhill mountain bike helmets have chinguards that help with that.
Most helmets do not protect your nose very well. The normal overhang in the front does protect the upper face from some injuries, but from the nose on down you are on your own. Some riders who crash are surprised to learn that. Parents occasionally email us asking why the helmet did not protect their child’s teeth or chin. Helmets do not protect things they don’t cover.
Helmet standards and designs for regular bike helmets are intended to protect the brain against catastrophic injury in a bad crash. They don’t work very well for minor concussions, and they don’t protect the face very well below the forehead. Your nose is important to you, but mushing it or scraping it on pavement is not life-threatening. Most riders decide to do without nose protection, or in some cases just don’t think about it at all, and of course do not really think they will ever crash.
The best you can do with a standard bike helmet is to look for one of the less expensive ones at Target or Wal-Mart that are made with thicker foam. Those do have a thicker overhang in front than the expensive ones in bike shops whose manufacturers have spent a lot of money with internal reinforcing to allow them to use thinner foam. Take a ruler along and measure, and you will see that some are thicker than others in front. Perhaps not thick enough to protect a nose, however.
For actual face protection there are full face helmets out there–most of them called downhill mountain bike racing helmets–with vents that make them at least semi-rideable on warm days. Those do offer some degree of face protection, and they have improved ventilation and comfort from the earliest models. The best, and heaviest, meet the ASTM F1952 downhill mountain bike racing standard. You can find them on our helmets for the current year page.
We do not recommend using hockey helmets or lacrosse helmets with face guards for bicycle riding. They are not designed or certified for the type of impacts bicycle riders can expect, and do not meet the CPSC bicycle helmet standard for impact protection.
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