Turn a full-face helmet upside down on a table and the expensive thing is the object in your hands — the shell, the liner, the strap, the certification label stitched into it. A Zyon, the air-filtering helmet New Atlas reported as a US$935 kit, puts a four-layer filter and an 18-hour fan inside that shell. A Puros, launched in India four years earlier, does the same job for US$56. That is a 16.7× spread between two products making the same promise to the same rider. And here is the part nobody writes down: the expensive one publishes the lower particle number.
The short version
- Zyon's air-filtering helmet was reported as a US$935 kit with more than 4,000 pre-orders, priced at €720 pre-order and €799 at launch, with deliveries from mid-2026 (New Atlas 2025; Motorcycle News 2025).
- India's Puros helmet launched in 2022 at 4,500 rupees (US$56) and claims it "removes more than 99% of PM 2.5 particles" — a higher published figure than the US$935 helmet, which "filters more than 80% of fine particles" (New Atlas).
- Under ECE 22.06, helmets are "tested with and without the accessories that are made for them" — so filtration bolted into a shell becomes part of what has to be homologated (RideApart).
- No product in this category publishes an EN 12941 class, the industrial standard that rates a powered respirator on total inward leakage rather than on what its filter paper can do.
- Zyon ships 12 filters with a stated cartridge life of one to three months; the price of a replacement filter is not published, so a five-year cost of ownership cannot be closed (Motorcycle News).
How Much Does a Zyon Helmet Cost, and What Else Is on the Shelf?
A Zyon costs €720 to pre-order and €799 at launch, reported as a US$935 kit. Its nearest rival costs US$56. Both are helmets with a fan and a filter, sold to riders breathing the same traffic, and between them sits almost the entire price range of a consumer safety product.
The category arrived in two steps, four years apart.
2022 — Puros. Shellios, an Indian company, launched what was billed as the first anti-pollution motorcycle helmet at 4,500 rupees (US$56), with a battery-driven fan at the rear of the shell. It claims to remove more than 99% of PM2.5 particles, and New Atlas reported that "independent tests show it reduces pollution exposure by more than 80%." It was certified under Indian helmet standards only, not internationally.
2025 — Zyon. A European entrant arrived at €720 pre-order, €799 at launch, a US$935 kit and more than 4,000 pre-orders. It is ECE 22.06 P/J certified with MIPS, offers six sizes and five colours, runs up to 18 hours, switches between three airflow modes, and uses a patented four-layer cartridge: mesh for water, bugs and large particles, then a fine-particle layer, then activated carbon for gases, then a protective fabric. It "filters more than 80% of fine particles." Sources: New Atlas, 22 July 2025 and Motorcycle News, September 2025.
2026 — the category stops being a press release. Zyon's production was set for late 2025 with deliveries from mid-2026, which is now. And from 1 January 2026, India's Ministry of Road Transport and Highways requires dealers to supply two BIS-certified helmets with every new two-wheeler (BikeAdvice). Filtering helmets are reaching hands, in the market with the most helmets on the most polluted roads.
The air did not improve while the prices sorted themselves out. IQAir's 2025 World Air Quality Report, covering 9,446 cities in 143 countries, found that only 14% of global cities met the WHO annual PM2.5 guideline of 5 µg/m³, and named Loni, India the most polluted city at 112.5 µg/m³ (IQAir).
What the money buys, per month you own it
Purchase price only. Pick an architecture, then set how long you plan to own it.
| Product | Purchase price | Published filtration claim |
|---|---|---|
| Puros helmet (2022) | US$56 | more than 99% of PM2.5 |
| Easi Breezi unit (2026) | US$199 | H11 media, at least 95% of PM2.5 |
| Zyon kit (2025) | US$935 | more than 80% of fine particles |
You're Not Buying a Filter. You're Buying a Shell.
The reason a filtering helmet can cost US$935 has almost nothing to do with filtration. A blower, a duct and a pleated media cartridge are commodity parts. What costs money in a helmet is the certified shell around them — and when the filtration is built into that shell, you buy the shell's economics along with it.
Look at what the expensive helmet is actually carrying. Six sizes and five colours means tooling and inventory across eleven variants. ECE 22.06 P/J homologation with MIPS means a test programme that, per RideApart's breakdown, added an oblique impact test at 6.0, 7.5, 8.2 and 8.5 m/s with a Brain Injury Criterion ceiling of 10,400 rad/s², plus a shell deformation test under 630 newtons. Crucially, 22.06 also means helmets are "tested with and without the accessories that are made for them." A fan and filter fixed into a shell is not a bolt-on to that process; it is inside it. Neither maker publishes a bill of materials, so the split between shell and filtration is an engineer's read rather than a sourced figure — but the direction is not in doubt, and the published prices are consistent with it.
Fusing the two also fuses their clocks. A helmet is a consumable safety item with a service life, and one that has taken an impact is replaced. In an integrated design the fan, the ducting and the filter housing are replaced with it — and the homologation you already paid for is re-purchased. A filter cartridge, meanwhile, is on a one-to-three-month clock. Those are two completely different replacement cycles welded to one another.
Two architectures, two replacement clocks SCHEMATIC
And the number everyone quotes is the wrong number. Industrial respiratory protection settled this decades ago. EN 12941 rates a powered air-purifying respirator on total inward leakage into the headtop, in three classes: TH1 at a maximum of 10%, TH2 at 2%, TH3 at 0.2% (HSQE Consultancy), which in UK practice carry assigned protection factors of 10, 20 and 40 times the workplace exposure limit (3M UK). That is a system figure: what actually reaches a face. Consumer filtering helmets publish the media's rating instead — more than 99% of PM2.5, more than 80% of fine particles. Those describe what the paper does on a bench.
No product in this category, at any price, publishes an EN 12941 class — and to be straight about it, that includes ours. We went into why fit rather than filter sets the ceiling in our teardown of pollution masks for riders and will not re-run it here. The narrower point is this: the category has no system-level rating, so a rider comparing prices has no comparable number to compare — and where the two published claims can be lined up, the US$935 product states the lower one.
The Five-Year Bill: What Clean Air Actually Costs a Rider
Here is the arithmetic on what US$935 covers, computed from the maker's own published figures rather than taken from a source: Zyon ships 12 filters with a cartridge life of one to three months. At the two-month midpoint, the box holds about 24 months of filtration. So the price buys a certified helmet plus roughly two years of clean air.
Then what? The replacement filter price is not published. That is the single most useful figure for anyone doing a five-year sum, and it does not exist publicly yet — so the five-year cost of ownership of the most expensive option in this category cannot be closed. Naming the gap is more honest than filling it with a guess.
The category is growing into that question, not away from it. One house puts the wearable air purifier market at US$1.32 billion in 2025 rising to US$2.02 billion by 2031, a 7.35% CAGR (Research and Markets) — roughly a 53% increase in spend across the window.
Our read on where that lands by 2031, and it is a prediction rather than a finding: the winning architecture is the one whose replacement cycle is decoupled from the helmet's. Filtration is a consumable. A certified shell is a capital item. Products that fuse them force the rider to re-buy the expensive half every time the cheap half — or the shell — reaches the end of its life. We made the same argument about form factor when we compared buying a filtering helmet against retrofitting the one you own, and about where the category is heading in our 2031 outlook for helmet air purifiers.
Clip the Filter to the Helmet You Already Trust
Easi Breezi is the decoupled version of the same idea: a clip-on helmet air purifier rather than a helmet. The unit clips to the helmet you already own and already trust, so the money goes into filtration rather than into re-certifying a shell — and a crash replaces a helmet, not a helmet and an air system. It runs H11 media rated at 95% or better on PM2.5, is IP67, is Patent Pending, and draws power from the bike rather than a battery you have to remember to charge. US$199, against the US$935 integrated route. That 95% is a media figure, same as everyone else's in this category — we would rather tell you that than imply it is a protection factor. Filter grades, and why H11 is the right choice for a moving vehicle, are covered in our HEPA filter guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a Zyon helmet cost?
€720 to pre-order and €799 at launch, reported as a US$935 kit, with more than 4,000 pre-orders taken and deliveries from mid-2026. That price includes the ECE 22.06 P/J certified helmet, the fan, and 12 filter cartridges.
What is the Zyon helmet price in India?
Zyon is priced in euros — €720 pre-order, €799 launch — and there is no India-specific price published, so an Indian buyer is looking at the euro price plus import duty and shipping. For context, India's own entrant in this category, the Puros helmet, launched at 4,500 rupees (US$56).
Do motorcycle helmets have air filters?
Almost none do. A standard helmet has vents, which move unfiltered air. Only a small number of purpose-built products add a powered filter — Puros from 2022, Zyon from 2025 — plus clip-on units that add filtration to a helmet you already own.
Is a more expensive filtering helmet better at filtering?
Not according to the published claims. The US$56 helmet states more than 99% of PM2.5 removed; the US$935 helmet states more than 80% of fine particles. Neither figure is a system rating, so neither tells you what reaches your face — but price plainly does not track the published filtration number in this category.
How often do you replace the filter in an air-filtering helmet?
Zyon states a cartridge life of one to three months depending on use and supplies 12 filters with the helmet, which covers roughly two years at the midpoint. After that you are buying replacements at a price the maker has not yet published.
Ready to Breathe Cleaner on Every Ride?
If you already own a helmet you trust and it fits you properly, the expensive half of this problem is solved. What is left is moving filtered air past your face — and that part is the cheap part, whatever the category's price list suggests. Pre-orders ship this week at US$199: the filter, not the helmet.
Written by Ash — mechanical engineer and founder of Easi Breezi, building an active HEPA filtration system for motorcycle helmets (patent pending). Based between Hong Kong and Bali, riding daily in the traffic this blog writes about.