Short answer: buy the full-face. If you ride anywhere above about 50 mph, buy the Shoei RF-1400 or something like it, because a chin bar is the one piece of coverage you cannot add later. Open-face helmets are legal, properly certified against DOT FMVSS 218, and genuinely better at three things — airflow, peripheral feel and getting your glasses on. If those things are what your riding is actually about — town speeds, short hops, an upright cruiser, hot weather — then the open-face route is a defensible choice and the Shoei J-Cruise II is the one we would buy. What is not defensible is choosing an open-face because you assume the difference is marginal. It is not marginal. It is your jaw.
That is the whole decision, and the rest of this page is the evidence behind it: what each type covers, what the certifications say (and conspicuously do not say), the weight numbers that contradict the usual assumption, and the four helmets in our registry that actually answer the question at four different prices.
What each type actually covers
A full-face helmet is a single uninterrupted shell from your forehead around your jaw and back up the other side, with a face shield closing the eye port. The chin bar is structural: it is tested as part of the helmet, it does not detach, and it sits between the lower half of your face and whatever you hit.
An open-face— the industry calls it three-quarter — covers the top, back and sides of the skull down past the ears and stops at the cheekbone line. Better ones add a face shield and an internal sun visor; cheaper ones leave eye protection to your glasses or goggles. A half helmet goes further still and stops above the ears. Our helmet types guide lays out all six categories if you want the wider map.
The thing worth internalising is that the difference is not a gradient of protection quality. It is a question of whether a specific area of your body is covered. A $900 open-face and a $200 full-face both cover your skull well; only one of them covers your chin at all.
The certification gap, stated honestly
Here is the finding from our own registry, and it is the single most useful fact on this page. Every open-face and half helmet we have dated specs for publishes DOT FMVSS 218 and nothing above it. No ECE 22.06. No Snell. That includes the Shoei J-Cruise II at premium money, whose US distributor states DOT alone.
Two things are true about that. The first is that it is partly a market artifact rather than a verdict: three-quarter helmets sell overwhelmingly into the US cruiser market, where DOT is the operative standard, so makers have little commercial reason to pay for European type approval. The second is that it is partly structural: Snell’s motorcycle protocol is built around a fixed chin bar, so helmets without one sit largely outside it. Either way, the practical consequence for a buyer is the same. If you want the extra testing — the oblique rotational impacts in ECE 22.06, or Snell M2025’s higher impact energies and penetration test — the choice narrows to full-face and modular helmets. That is why every helmet on our safest helmets ranking is one or the other.
What we will not do is tell you how much protection that gap represents in percentage terms. Nobody publishes comparative impact data for US-market helmets. SHARP, the UK program and the only public body that star-rates helmets against each other, tests a different catalog against a different standard. Anybody quoting you a figure for how much safer a full-face is has gone past the published record.
The four helmets, side by side
Every figure below is read from the maker’s or the US retailer’s own page on the date recorded on each product card. “Not published” means exactly that — we did not find the figure, so we are not supplying one.
| Helmet | Type | Published certification | Published weight | Shield / sun visor |
|---|
| Shoei RF-1400 | Full-face | DOT, Snell M2025 | 1,651 g | Pinlock-ready shield; no sun visor |
|---|
| Shoei J-Cruise II | Open-face | DOT only | 1,615 g | Pinlock-ready CJ-2 shield; internal sun shield |
|---|
| Scorpion EXO Covert X | Convertible (full / three-quarter / half) | DOT only | 1,501 g | Clear visor supplied; internal sun visor |
|---|
| Bell Pit Boss | Open-face | DOT only | 1,107 g | No face shield; internal sun shade |
|---|
Read the weight column again, because it demolishes the most common assumption about this comparison. The full-face RF-1400 is 36 g heavier than the premium open-face J-Cruise II and 150 g heavier than the convertible Covert X. A full-face concentrates its mass in a thin composite shell; a good open-face has to carry a large shield, an internal sun visor and a wide shell opening, and that hardware does not weigh nothing. Only the shieldless Bell Pit Boss is meaningfully light, and it is light because it has removed the eye protection. If you were choosing open-face to save your neck on a long day, the published numbers do not support you — see our lightest helmets ranking for the full-face models that genuinely are light.
Where open-face wins, for real
Heat at low speed. This is not a small thing in a Phoenix July. With no chin bar and no sealed shield there is nothing between moving air and your face, and no vented full-face matches it below about 40 mph. Our hot-weather helmet ranking covers the full-face models that get closest.
Glasses.No cheek pads means no fight with the temple arms. If you wear prescription glasses and have given up on snug full-face helmets, this is a genuine quality-of-life argument — though our helmets-for-glasses ranking exists precisely because several full-face helmets solve it too.
Short, slow, stop-start riding. Deliveries, errands, dense city traffic, a scooter commute: you take the helmet off constantly, you are rarely above 35 mph, and you want to hear and be heard. That is the open-face use case stated at its strongest.
Upright cruiser ergonomics. On a bike that sits you bolt upright with your face into clean air, a full-face shield can feel like a windscreen you are wearing. That is a comfort preference rather than a safety argument, and it is why the type persists in the market. Our cruiser helmet ranking takes both types seriously for exactly this reason.
Where open-face costs you, also for real
Noise. A wide shell opening in a 70 mph airstream is loud, and hearing damage from wind noise is cumulative and permanent. Our guide to reducing wind noise applies doubly here, and earplugs stop being optional. The quietest helmets are all full-face, which is not a coincidence.
Weather and debris.Rain at speed on an uncovered face is genuinely painful. So is a stone, an insect or a lungful of truck spray. A full-face with a Pinlock-ready shield is a different machine in bad weather — see our rain helmet ranking.
Comms.Mounting an intercom on a helmet with no chin bar and more ambient noise is harder to get right. It can be done — the J-Cruise II is tooled for Shoei’s SRL headset and the Pit Boss and Covert X both ship with speaker pockets — but start from our intercom ranking rather than assuming any unit will work.
And the chin bar. Said once more because it is the only irreversible item on the list.
So: how to actually decide
Highway, touring, commuting at speed, new rider, one-helmet household? Full-face. Start at our full-face ranking, or at the beginner ranking if this is your first lid. A modular is the compromise worth knowing about: a fixed-feeling helmet you can open at the lights, covered in our full-face vs modular comparison.
Town speeds, hot climate, upright bike, glasses, and you have read the trade-offs above and still want it?Open-face, and buy a good one. The J-Cruise II is the only open-face in our registry built to full-face standards everywhere except the chin bar — Pinlock-ready shield, real internal sun shield, composite shell in four sizes. The Bell Pit Boss is the budget route, and a composite shell with a drop-down sun shade at that money is a strong spec sheet, as long as you accept that eye protection is now your problem to solve.
Genuinely cannot choose? The Scorpion EXO Covert X converts between three shapes from one shell with a magnetic front mask. Our one hard caveat is on the card and we will repeat it here: the mask is a styling and wind-blast feature, not a certified chin bar. Buy it as a very good open-face that can look like a full-face, never as a full-face you can take apart.
Whichever way you go, get the sizing right first. A badly fitting full-face that stays in the garage protects nobody, and that remains the most expensive mistake in helmet buying.