If you follow the fortunes of Head-sponsored athletes on the World Cup circuit, you know that they own a lease on the podium in every event but slalom. Curiously, our testers, who of course aren’t wearing WC start bibs on the weekends and who struggle to bend the Rebels i.Speed and would probably wake up in the clinic if they ever essayed a true World Cup DH or SG ski, positively adore the Head Rebels i.SL RD. Just goes to show, as if any further proof were needed, how deep and un-bridgeable is the gulf between the planet’s best skiers and the rest of us.

The point of this intro, aside from administering a dose of humility, is that Head keeps tinkering with this model even though what they had was already perfect from our panelists’ point of view.  The latest tweaks do nothing to dull its performance attributes, but the latest i.SL RD requires the full attention of its pilot if it’s to be fully appreciated.

“Very sturdy, powerful machine,” assessed Footloose’s Corty Lawrence, “Push as hard as you want, go as fast as you want.  Have to be a tad careful at high speed not to pressure the tip too quickly, but rebound is symmetrical.”  Other testers concurred with Corty that the i.SL RD skied its best when tilted at a steep enough angle to allow the whole ski to bend.  “What a beautiful, balanced feel throughout the turn,” agreed one of The Sport Loft contingent who regularly rates race skis.

One of the best reasons for becoming a really accomplished skier is you get to enjoy skiing a stick like the Head Worldcup Rebels i.SL.  Just point and go.

Our intrepid XXL tester felt he could maneuver with the same sinuous flow one feels on in-line skates, “even at slow speeds, if you’re willing to carve it. What a fun ride.”  The sensation of perpetual snow contact is palpable throughout the speed range, particularly on a firm, inflexible surface.

Of Head’s troika of super-charged slaloms, the i.SL falls in the middle: it’s not the fall-line-focused, FIS-approved i.SL RD (for Race Department, connoting it’s the real McCoy), nor is it the slightly rockered, more supple i.Supershape Speed, which owns an even more open-minded attitude when it comes to conforming to terrain and varied turn shapes.   The i.SL behaves like a true race slalom with excellent manners; it knows it can do more than its handler can, but it has the decency not to show it.

Perhaps all you need to know about the Rebels i.Speed is that, had the FIS not begun tinkering with dimensional requirements for GS skis in 2006, this would have been Bode Miller’s or Ted Ligety’s or Hermann Maier’s ski. Its appearance here at the bottom of our pile is more of measure of our mutable spring test conditions and the fact that real-deal GS race skis are tough to favorably evaluate at subsonic speeds.

The i.Speed pouts until it’s given free rein on snow hard as tarmac, with an open throttle – “the faster, the better,” Zac Larsen of The Lifthouse advised – and a pilot capable of executing the edge angles it needs to be controlled.  That’s a lot of provisos for an everyday ski for the not-every-day skier.  It takes some moxie to toss your skis as far away as your legs will allow when the snow just below your hip is as hard and slippery as a polished slab of Vermont marble and you’re traveling at speeds that would get you pulled over in 48 states; but just in case you’re so inclined there are a few ski makers like Head – thank Ullr – willing to make skis that are ready to make this move when you are.

Head makes four extraordinary Technical skis, all loaded with the same piezo-electric powered construction that Head calls KERS and you’ll call kick-ass. It uses the energy you create when you load the ski to stiffen the tail proportionately, so the more power you generate, the more the ski supports then projects you into the next arc.

All this goes on without calling the slightest attention to itself, except you might notice you are suddenly skiing like a minor deity.  At 72mm underfoot, the Magnum is one of the narrower options in the i.Supershape collection that includes the Titan, Rally and Speed, yet you wouldn’t know it in a lot of off-trail conditions. It’s so stable and confidence building you’ll want to take it everywhere but in the backcountry.

Wherever you want to head, the Magnum is up for it because it’s never encountered a condition that intimidates it. All this all-terrain talk shouldn’t obscure the fact that the Magnum is the epitome of grace and power on the hard snow where it will most likely spend most of its life.

The path of true love is unpredictable.  Who would have imagined a hard-charging, fall-line facing, long-turn habitué falling for a super-shaped little package like the Head i.Supershape Speed? (Do NOT mistake her for the Rebels i.Speed, an entirely different species. We now return to our budding romance.)

This ski has “short turns only need apply” practically tattooed on its forebody, yet as I take her out on the dance floor and show her my go-to turns, she’s right with me. So to test the relationship I take her into gnarly, snowboard-chewed bumps and what does she do? Darts between them like she was a pair of ballet pumps, laughing at the ease with which she achieves the improbable.

I’m smitten, so when she asks if she can now (finally!) do her thing, I lead her to the steepest groomed pitch we know (we’ll call it ours from hereon after) where she proceeds to string short turns like pearls on an unbroken string.  If I haven’t tumbled all the way it’s because she can be demanding, doesn’t like to be pushed sideways and won’t go where she’ll be in over her head in powder.  But otherwise, she is both beautiful and fun to be with.

Most ski lines are comprised of 3 to 5 distinct series, each with its own chassis, application and customer profile.  Within each series, there tends to be a star product, one that ends up being the main focus of interest and sales.  In Head’s i.Supershape series the Titan… is not that product.

For the i.Supershape collection is that rare breed, the all-star series in which every model is so talented and so delicious to ski, they all deserve to have their name at the top of the marquee.  As the widest in its family (80mm underfoot), the Titan was preordained to earn high marks for versatility, as indeed it does. It possesses the intoxicating quality of magnifying its pilot’s efforts.  If you can lay it over, the Titan will take care of the rest.

This isn’t just the euphoria induced by a strong yet tractable ski; the Titan actually has an on-board microchip and piezos that together turn vibration into acceleration.  {They call it the Kinetic Energy Recovery System; turgid terminology, but true.) “The system works,” one tester validated, “I could feel the tail stiffen and accelerate at the end of the turn.”

While the Titan can’t make the tiny turns of its bulimic-thin brother, the i.Supershape Speed, it’s no slouch at making slalom turns if that’s what you want.  In fact, it earned one of our highest ratings for short-radius turns.  This facility coupled with its penchant for exploring the speed limit gives the Titan a range of versatility that has earned it a devoted following.

The Titan is so well balanced between Power and Finesse traits that last season we listed it as a Finesse Favorite while this season we’re stressing its Power properties.  “It’s a high performance ski for experienced skiers,” pinpoints Michael from Footloose, “stiff yet playful. Stable at high speeds and even great making small turns in the chutes.”

So what’s the big difference between Head’s Titan and Rally?  Once you opted for one over the other, none.

We suppose one could say that about any two skis vying for one’s affections, but with the Head Rally and Titan, it really is a choice with no possible bad outcome. Whatever the Titan can do, the Rally can do, and vice versa.  The skis are even priced the same and come with the same choice of Tyrolia binding.  All things being even, you might as well base your selection on your school colors.

To help illuminate the Rally’s allure, allow me to share a personal moment from a ski test last February at Mammoth Mountain.  The Rally was my 13th ski of the day, representing some 20 runs, and my tank was running low.  Perhaps it was my prayer for Ullr’s protection, but the Rally made the late afternoon sally effortless. It was a turn genie: all I had to do was think of an arc and off we went.

The Rally has one talent that too often goes untapped: it actually handles off-piste conditions better than all the other Heads in this genre, but one.  If you guessed the Rally’s slightly wider clone, the Titan, you’ve cottoned on to the meaning of this review.

Last year Head introduced the first skis – and one of the first consumer products of any kind – using Graphene™, the miracle material one-atom thick.  As the apotheosis of gossamer, Graphene was a perfect fit for women’s skis, so that’s where it was first applied, to universal acclaim.

This season Head introduced two new men’s lines featuring Graphene, the Monster series, sold without an integrated binding system, and the Instinct collection, a nearly parallel line built with bindings included.  The Raw Instinct plays second fiddle to the Power Instinct in the new line (although both are priced identically), but our panel placed the Raw’s performance at the head of the Instinct clan.

The addition of Graphene allowed Head to trim some excess weight from the Power and the Raw, but they retain a wood core and two Titanal laminates so they don’t end up in the same featherweight country as the women’s Joy models.  This is why the Raw skis like a strong, traditional ski with a flat (unrockered) tail, only revealing its relatively lighter heft when circumstances conspire to lift a ski off the snow.

The Raw out-performed the Power in our estimation as it proved easier to bow into a deep arc and more amenable to drifting to the edge, a subtle skill prized by the expert skier.  This raised our impression of its overall comportment, making it our pick as the best ski in the Instinct litter.

It would interesting to know precisely how Head changed flex and mass distribution on the Power Instinct Ti Pro compared to the Raw Instinct, as they share the same materials, make-up and price, yet the Power comes across as so brittle and hard to bow it scored poorly for all Finesse criteria.  Perhaps the Power Instinct is bred to come alive at World Cup racing speeds, its true talents as inapplicable to ordinary humans as the sound of a dog whistle.  For whatever reason, our panelists were unanimous in identifying its indifference to short turns, resistance to drifting and impatience with off-piste conditions.

Perhaps our panelists’ low scores were a reflection of deflated hopes.  The ski the Power Instinct replaces, the Rev 85 Pro, was a sweetheart any skier could love.  The addition of Graphene™ to the traditional wood/metal construction should have made everything feel lighter and zippier, no?  Well, no.  Lightness isn’t the dominant impression imparted and the Power Instinct isn’t one iota easier to ski.  No matter how powerful a ski is, it needs a dose of forgiveness or its power can’t be tamed.

Head has always offered an exceptional cost/value ski in their line, and this year it’s the Strong Instinct Ti Pro.  At $599 including binding, the Strong Instinct is ideal for the skier who hasn’t renewed their gear in ages and has limited resources to expend on new skis.  Unlike its stiffer elder siblings, the Strong Instinct is responsive at slow to medium speeds and is open to suggestion about turn shapes.

A groomed snow ski from its slightly rockered tip to its rounded-off tail, the Strong Instinct is notable for the quality you’d expect to find in a synthetic-core ski using Graphene™:  it’s light on your feet.  Titanal keeps it in its traces on the manicured surfaces where it prefers to travel.  An intermediate chap looking to raise his game or an advanced skier hoping to make life on snow a little easier would both fit the Strong Instinct profile.

All of Head’s new Monster models are allegedly built with the same construction and materials (they share a mutual price tag of $800 MSRP), but they don’t ski that way.  The narrowest of the lot, the Monster 83, gets lost in fat ski limbo: it’s built on an off-trail chassis but with an on-trail shape.  The net result is a ski that isn’t as capable as a carver on groomers or as adept in 3-D snow as a wider ski would be.

Since I have your attention and don’t have much to add re the Monster 83, allow me proffer an obliquely related anecdote to compensate you for your time.  The renowned English playwright and wit, George Bernard Shaw, was accosted by a stunning young socialite who hoped to charm him by cooing, “With your brains and my beauty, just imagine the children we would have!”  To which GBS replied, “Ah, but what if they should have your brains and my beauty?”

It’s safe to say no other ski has ever achieved the combination of strength and light weight embodied in the Head Super Joy.  Of course, no other women’s skis but Head’s Joy series have the benefit of using Graphene™, the one-atom thick matrix of carbon that is still finding its footing in the industrial world.

With the Super Joy, Head blends Graphene with carbon-reinforced fiberglass in a sandwich around a Koroyd core.  Koroyd is a honeycomb matrix first used by Salomon in the tips of their Rocker2 models for the same reason Head uses it here: it doesn’t weigh anything. The net effect is a ski so light you’d think it would need a tether to keep it from floating away.  Can such an ethereal body as the Super Joy’s possibly hold its own in variable snow conditions?

Oh, yeah.  The carving control is automatic, with a tidy 12.5m sidecut radius in a 163cm, which is more shapely than a World Cup slalom ski.  The snow feel is sensational, for the Super Joy lets the flow of the terrain shine through without being dulled by wads of rubber and metal.

Best of all, the edge grip exceeds anything you thought possible with a ski so light.  “Held a high speed GS turn,” said an awed Fox from Footloose.  “Fun, responsive, sturdy,” noted Kim from Cal Ski Co., the third adjective being the one that pops off the page.  The Peter Glenn crew encountered all kinds of conditions at their Aspen caper, allowing one of their number to explain, “Turns great in the hardpack, slush, crust, mashed potatoes and corn.”

At the end of the day, the Super Joy defies every expectation. It shouldn’t hold so well. It shouldn’t be so energetic. It certainly shouldn’t go off-piste with such facility.  Be prepared to be proven delightfully wrong on all counts.

Every time a ski R&D department tumbles unto a new aerospace fiber, the engineers can’t wait to see what it can do.  They put it near the base; they try it by the sidewalls, they drape it over the topskin.  They use it in place of titanal; they substitute it for a layer or two of fiberglass; they see if they can make an entire ski out of it.  In the giddy glow of invention, they don’t always anticipate every consequence.

So we imagine it was at Head with Graphene™, the carbon that comes in one-atom thick increments.  Umpteen times stronger than anything you can name, Graphene must have been received as the Messiah that will finally deliver ski makers from metal.  But it appears it isn’t capable of all miracles, as the missing “e” in Absolut Joy stands for experts.  The Absolut Joy is geared to the relatively low speeds and short turns of intermediates, who will probably love it if for no other reason than it looks elegant and weighs less than a guilty conscience.

Lighter women and lower skilled gals aren’t going to have the slightest qualm about these quibbles, as the Absolut Joy was made with them in mind.  Within its speed range it’s agile and relatively energetic and it holds well enough on hard snow to instill confidence.

Bearing in mind who it’s for, the Pure Joy delivers on its name.  The Pure Joy is a real test of Graphene’s™ capabilities, as the space-age material gets little structural help from an injected foam core.  This makes the Pure feel like feathers on one’s feet, a short-turn specialist more maneuverable than a mamba.  Its highest marks are for forgiveness and short turn facility (note the 10.9m turn radius @ 158cm), underscoring the Pure’s purpose: to turn the timid, in time, into tigresses.

After the standing ovation received by Head’s Joy skis for women when they debuted last season, the first use of Graphene™ in a ski, the market was keen to see what Head would do with the miracle, one-atom thick material in a series of men’s models.

Perhaps no ski could have satisfied such lofty expectations, but whatever the gulf between imagination and reality (say, where are all our jet-packs, anyway?), suffice it to say the new Monsters take a few runs to figure out.  In the one-run-and-done world of ski testing, this is a fatal flaw.  When, due to heightened interest, dozens of testers submit cards, any doubts about performance will multiply, pulling scores down.

If this sounds like an overlong apology, it is, for the Monster 88 shouldn’t have to sit in the back at the awards ceremony.  In addition to Graphene, all Monsters are encased in two sheets of Titanal so they thirst for speed.  It’s when they’re shackled to a succession of short turns that they protest too much.  Left to exercise their right to charge, they slice through whatever’s in front of them.  Anyone expecting a lightweight pixie stick will be disappointed, but someone with skills and a dab of athleticism will be able to guide it through just about any terrain.

All of the new Monster models from Head are priced at the same MSRP and are likely to be market priced likewise. For our money, the 88 is the most marvelous of the Monsters.

Last year we placed the Total Joy among our Power Picks and it still has the chops to hang with that crowd, but more impressive than its puissance is its pussycat ease.

The Total Joy is assembled from the lightest materials in the ski-maker’s tool chest, carbon fiber and Koroyd honeycomb, and adds the ultimate in the strength-to-weight contest, Graphene™, carbon one-atom thick and absurdly stronger than steel.  Put it all together in a deep-dish sidecut and you have a kick-ass carving machine that weighs next to nothing. Liz Taylor owned necklaces that weighed more a pair of Total Joys.

We could have plucked superlatives from dozens of test cards like Natalie’s from Powder House, who raved, “Fun, quick, solid, maneuverable, excellent!”  Or Kayla from across the country at Aspen Ski and Board, who came away “super impressed!  Great edge hold, very stable… way more than I expected from this light a ski.  Fun in trees, fun all around!  Very versatile,” she added for emphasis.

Every ski test card I’ve ever encountered included as its final criterion a catchall bucket such as “Overall Impression,” that tried to capture in one score all the qualities delineated in the previous nine. On a realskiers test card, the one score that says it all is “Finesse/Power balance,” since our fondest wish is to find a ski with unlimited power that’s ridiculously easy to ski.

The Head Venture 95 doesn’t rise quite to that ideal level, but its balance between Power and Finesse properties is nearly perfect.  For a ski this heavily rockered to feel so comfortable at speed is counter-intuitive.  The Venturi 95 pulls off this neat trick by using a design all their own that adds a matrix of shock-sucking elastomer covered in a fiberglass shell to both the tip and tail.  It must work, because one doesn’t notice any loose steering once its on edge.

Telluride’s Boot Doctor Bob Gleason describes the Venturi 95 as a “confidence-building ski,” getting right to the nugget of what makes the Venturi so fun.  “Accurate, smooth and predictable,” he adds, with “a clean, comfortable ride in varying types of terrain and snow.”

The narrowest and most versatile of Head’s Big Mountain ski family, the Venturi takes to battered, worked-over snow like a dolphin to a wave. Head knows what the powder skier forgets in his euphoria, that all freshies come to an end, and then it’s back to the groom, like it or not.  The Venturi likes it, for despite its rockered baseline it hasn’t lost its carving skills and isn’t shy about accumulating speed.  Unintimidating to its pilots yet fearless in the face of adversity, the Venturi strikes a near-perfect balance between technical, Power properties like edge grip at speed and here-let-me-do-that-for-you Finesse qualities.

If the Monster 98 were to submit a personality profile to a dating service, it might read something like this—

Background: Mixed race: Mom was a Big Mountain gal; Dad was a Carver.  Likes: Soft snow, preferably powder up to the knees.  Oh, and going fast; I can’t stand going slow.  Turn-offs:  Posers.  Skinny people with their skinny skis. Moguls. (Am I right, people?)   Anyone who calls me fat.

As you can see from its profile, the Monster 98 is a bit high maintenance. If it’s sensitive about its weight, it’s because several of our testers commented that, Graphene™ notwithstanding, the Monster 98 felt heavy and recommended it for heavier skiers. It’s decidedly on its best behavior in powder, where it’s having too much fun to be finicky. In tweener conditions like crud and wind crust it reverts to its carving roots and rides a high edge like a champ. There’s no point in getting a 98 if you don’t take into whatever loose snow you can find, so our advice is to turn this Monster loose in the nearest powder field.

The tiny ski industry lacks the financial wherewithal to invest in materials research, but thankfully the aerospace biz shares some similar concerns about ultra-light materials that are super-strong and able to resist unearthly vibrations.  Hence Head was able to get their hands on Graphene™, a sheet of carbon one-atom thick, which sounds about as thin as an element can be.

How they’re able to handle a material of this infinitesimal dimension is a mystery, but what it does for a ski’s handling is becoming clear.  It allows the ski designer to cut weight to a silly degree while retaining crud-sucking qualities and speed management skills formerly associated with much heavier materials.  The snow feel is extraordinary, as if one’s race boots had suddenly acquired the sensitivity in the sole of a skateboard shoe.  Women often look at moguls as if they were mine fields; on the Great Joy, they can skim them as if their skis were butterfly wings.  Despite their relatively low weight, there’s no need to ski them long to make them more stable.  Our experience suggests a 168cm Great Joy can support a 180-pound male without a hitch in its stride.

Head’s phenomenal success as a racing brand overshadows its less lustrous history as a freeride line, and it’s hard to argue otherwise when one side has household names like Lindsay, Bode, Anna and Ted on its roster.  (The old Head Monster series had headline freeride talent such as Johnny, Allison, Jon and Rex, but we digress.)

The same engineers who equip the Head racing stable design the rest of the line, the Collective 105 included. Perhaps that’s why the Collective deploys the deepest sidecut of any ski in the Big Mountain category. At Head, a ski has to carve; if you want to build it with a waist as wide as a semi, fine, but first it must be capable of etching an arc.

The Collective earns its highest marks in the most prestigious criterion, Finesse/Power balance.  This grade is as close as we can get to an assurance that the ski possesses technical properties accessible to all.

One other factor that increases the accessibility of the Collective 105 is its relatively modest price, making it the value leader among our Power picks.

When we say a Big Mountain ski “behaves like a carver,” we mean that even though its wide dimensions favor powder, it still works best at the high speeds and edge angles that the hourglass-waisted carving clan requires.  In a field of smear sticks that regard carving as a quaint obsession for the old-fashioned, the Monster 108 stands out as an iconoclast that isn’t afraid to admit it likes to ride a high edge.

“Once at speed you forget about it’s width,” alleges Zach from Footloose, one of several testers who noted that the Monster 108 likes its turns served hot. Winks from Cal Ski Co didn’t object to its long-turn disposition, calling the Monster 108 a “heavy, powerful, stable destroyer.  Skied it in the perfect Tahoe cement and it plowed everything in front of it; no matter how thick or heavy, it busted it up for me.”  If you’re willing to surrender some short turn agility for crud-crushing capacity, the Monster 108 is up your alley.

Head’s R&D department owns the rights to use Graphene™, the lightest and strongest material known to man, in skis.  At one atom thick, Graphene won’t lose any “who’s got the lightest stuff?” contest any time soon. With 300 times the strength of steel, wherever Graphene goes, lots of other stuff comes out and the ski is stronger for it.

When selectively deployed along the ski’s length, it affects weight distribution, so on a fat mama like the Big Joy it’s used away from the center, towards the tip and tail.  This makes a ski that’s easier to pivot side to side in the soft stuff, but still strong enough to resist the buffeting the comes with skiing crud.

The Big Joy is a quiet-riding wood core ski that thanks to Graphene feels like it’s made from pixie dust.  Its light-as-lint weight is complemented by a svelte 14.8m radius sidecut centered by a plump 110mm waist, a combination that creates a ski built for short turns whether you slice ‘em or smear ‘em.

Just because Powder skis lie at the opposite end of the width spectrum from Technical skis, don’t think for a moment Head won’t bring all their technical talents to bear when concocting an obese board.

Do they use all the highfalutin tech in their World Cup race skis?  Of course not.  Not only would such a move make the skis ungodly heavy, worse yet, the race tech wouldn’t even work. So Head went another direction, embedding a web of shock-absorbing elastomers at tip and tail and encasing it in a fiberglass shell to boost torsional rigidity.

Called rather unromantically the Tip and Tail Stabilizer System, the method must work, for the Cyclic 115 is rockered to the moon and back yet motors along like it had four-wheel drive.  It does a couple of tricks you’d swear a 115 couldn’t, like slide through bumps or cut a short arc from a highly pitched edge, exiting the turn with a little burst of energy.

Of course as a 115 the Cyclic can smear like a finger painter, but the surprise is how easy it is to get on edge.   You can even go “super-carving” on a low-angle, groomed slope and the Cyclic slinks along on its smiley-face baseline as if this were the most fun it’s ever had.  (It isn’t.)

A lot of fat boys steer with the subtlety of a barge.  The Cyclic is no water nymph either, but it can go all day on a pow day without you ever thinking about changing skis. “So much in one ski,” says the pleasantly stunned Charlie from Peter Glenn.  You can almost hear, in those 5 simple words, the longing for another run.