Bell XR Spherical MIPS helmet review – comfortable do-everything helmet that promises durability

Bell brings Spherical MIPS tech to a helmet that’s aimed at gravel and serious recreational riders who want a lid to last more than one season

Image shows the Bell XR Spherical MIPS helmet.
(Image credit: John Stevenson)
Cycling Weekly Verdict

An excellent helmet for everything except possibly road racing, with great looks and ventilation, and a range of features that make it very easy to live with.

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Very comfortable

  • +

    Very well ventilated

  • +

    MIPS feature may improve protection

  • +

    Lots of clever, useful features

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    Expensive

  • -

    On the heavy side

You can trust Cycling Weekly. Our team of experts put in hard miles testing cycling tech and will always share honest, unbiased advice to help you choose. Find out more about how we test.

Bell has played a blinder with the XR Spherical, a helmet that combines great looks and practicality with the marque’s most advanced head protection technology. Combine that with an easily-adjusted cradle, one-handed magnetic buckle and a host of other user-friendly tweaks and you might just have the best helmet on the market for all-rounders who mix up road, gravel and trail riding. 

Bell XR Spherical MIPS helmet: construction

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John Stevenson
Freelance reviewer

One of the UK's most experienced cycling journalists, John started writing about bikes for Mountain Biking UK magazine back in the late 1980s. A spell in Sydney saw him editing Australian Mountain Bike magazine, before getting online as a news and production editor at Cyclingnews.com, in the 'the drugs are for my dog' era. Since returning to the UK in 2006 he has worked on the launch of Bikeradar.com, and launched Totalwomenscycling.com before handing the editorship over to someone more representative of the readership. He has also written for Cycling Plus and Cyclist magazines, and most recently was editor-at-large for road.cc. He lives in Cambridge with his partner and a silly number of dogs (or possibly a number of silly dogs), and divides his riding time between Tarmac and gravel while battling the notorious Fenland headwinds.