Overview
Every brand, large and small, foreign or domestic, has to make a choice about how they want to build a ski. Once they settle on a construction and the equipment to execute it is on premises, they tend to stay with it for the long haul. Head’s wheelhouse construction could not be more fundamental or more sound: while other brands have obsessed with making a cheaper, higher margin ski, Head has stayed with what it knows will never fail them: a stout wood core, two sheets of Titanal and carefully calibrated, pre-impregnated fiberglass to wrap it all up. To those who might quibble some of Head’s skis are over-built, we would counter, wouldn’t you rather own a brand that errs on the side of excellence?
As an Austrian brand, Head has always placed a premium on race results, and its investments in this area have paid impressive dividends. In a sport where wins can be measured in the thousandth of a second, who comes out on top may appear serendipitous; when athlete after athlete is holding up a crystal globe recognizing a season of superiority, something other than serendipity is afoot.
While Head’s victories on the World Cup can’t be discounted, translating gold medals into dollars hasn’t been easy. The American market is not race-driven, to put it mildly. Americans want to go where they wanna go, do what they wanna, wanna do; we’re all about freeride, dude! Head, to its great credit, is first and foremost about technique. Head was the first major brand to treat the Carving trend seriously and make it part of its identity. Hooking into the top of a turn is part of the brand’s essential make-up. Even its retired off-trail Monster series had a baseline and tail design more like a carving ski than the typical smear sticks found in the Big Mountain genre. It shouldn’t surprise that Head’s off-trail skis once languished in anonymity in the U.S.
Until the 2017/18 season, when Head unveiled the Kore series. Three years earlier, in 2014/15, Head had changed its entire women’s collection, centering the new series on its use of Graphene, carbon in a matrix one-atom thick. Since then, Graphene has spread through every product category, finally reaching the off-trail Kore collection. Capitalizing on Graphene’s obscene strength-to-weight ratio, Head matched it with Koroyd honeycomb, a triaxial weave of carbon and ultralight Karuba wood to build the Kore’s core, topping it with fleece to minimize mass.
It’s no exaggeration to say the Kore series has catapulted Head into hitherto unknown sales territory for its All-Mountain, Big Mountain and Powder models. Head attempted another coup seven years ago with a new lightweight series of system carving skis called V-Series (for its high taper ratio between tip width and tail width). The V-Series used Graphene in a construction dubbed LYT Tech, applying the same materials used in Kore models to make exceptionally lightweight carving skis. Paired commercially with the Nexo-LYT boot – also built with Graphene and made to be as light as possible – Head pioneered a new generation of skis that don’t require as much mass to be stable at speed.
Head is betting heavily that the LIB trend isn’t a fad but a here-to-stay reality. The V-Series of (mostly) Frontside skis replaced the Instinct system skis that were built along the same Old School lines as the Monsters. The Monsters have followed the Instincts into retirement, yielding their spot in Head’s line-up to the narrowest Kore, the 87.
The contrast between Head’s two carving collections, Supershape and Shape (née V-Shape), couldn’t be starker. When Head added Graphene to the Supershapes a few seasons ago, it used the weight savings to add more metal to the mix. The Shapes eliminate metal everywhere but in the edges. The Supershapes aim exclusively at skiers with elite skills; the Shapes hit every price point from coach to first class. The Shapes also have companion Nexo LYT boots, a high degree of product integration often seen in backcountry ensembles but not much elsewhere in the current market.
That Head should continue to offer two families of carving skis with contrasting personalities speaks to both the popularity of on-trail skiing in Europe and the brand’s long-standing commitment to carving as the cornerstone of the recreational market. Since the advent of shaped skis, no other brand has been as invested in the carving category, both financially and philosophically, as Head. Its 5-model Supershape series has been the benchmark for dual-track carving tools for a decade. For the 2025 season, the entire Supershape series was significantly tweaked. While the key waist-width measurements remain the same for all, there’s significantly less flare at tip and tail, so the overall shape is more conducive to all-mountain skiing without losing its capacity to cut precision arcs on the hard stuff.
Five years ago, the Supershapes received a new electronic damping system called Energy Management Circuit (EMC). Unlike the KERS technology it replaced, EMC operates both fore and aft of the binding, where it intercepts and neutralizes shock waves when they hit 80Hz. At speeds when many other skis begin to wobble, the EMC Supershapes purr contentedly along.
Head is the only major brand to make an entire women’s collection from scratch, without reference to a single unisex template. Head refreshed its original Joy collection six seasons ago, beefing up their construction with more wood in the core to go along with its Graphene-infused glass. In 2021, Head created a new Joy at the top of the series, the aptly named Power Joy, that uses Head’s premium Worldcup Sandwich Cap construction, embellished with EMC to ensure it has no top end. (The Joy collection received another significant re-design in 2024, which we’ll dissect below.)
Four years ago, the big news at Head was a series of small but significant tweaks to every one of Head’s popular Kore series, including the introduction of a new model, the Kore 111. The main structural change was the elimination of synthetic Koroyd in favor of a full dose of Karuba and poplar in its now all-wood core. The flex pattern also was fiddled with, creating a stiffer stick in the thinner widths that will spend more time on hard snow, while the wider versions are softer and more responsive.
Another small change with a big effect was beveling the top edge, so the ski can slide sideways almost without resistance. On a Big Mountain model with the girth of the Kore 111, this makes a huge difference in how easy it is to swivel the bottom of the turn, a labor-saver that will prolong your powder day.
The Kore line comes in a slew of sizes, at 7cm increments, so skiers can find the length that’s tailored to their specifications. In 2023, Head added one more modification to all the Kores, a top coating of urethane, intended to improve the durability and appearance of the top sheet. Taken in toto, the various modifications made to all the Kore models, men’s and women’s alike, improved the skis’ snow feel to the point that, light weight aside, it’s indistinguishable from a well-made traditional ski.
Just two years ago, Head again updated its Joy series of women’s skis, introducing several key modifications that raised the performance ante. The most obvious change from the Total Joys of yore was a new tip shape that shaved away 6mm, trimming the forebody and diminishing its propensity for digging in hard at the top of a turn. Its slimmer silhouette opened up its sidecut radius, which in turn expanded its receptivity to variable terrain and improved overall handling in deep snow.
While the change in forebody geometry had a profound effect on performance, the most significant innovation of the 2024 Joy series – which was unchanged for the 2025 and 2026 seasons – was the plate that connected it to its integrated Tyrolia binding. What made the re-design of the Joy binding platform important was that it solved a puzzle that had plagued ALL system skis: the effect of boot sole length on ramp angle. All demo-style systems have moveable toes and heels with a fixed height that remains the same whether the boot going into it is large or small. There’s no way to avoid the fact that the ramp angle between heel and toe will be shallow on long boots and steepest for the short boots most likely to be used by a woman.
Head’s solution is a two-piece plate that automatically accounts for the variance in toe and heel height so that the platform maintains a constant .55o ramp angle regardless of boot sole length. Now every skier gets the performance advantage of being positioned in the ideal stance to retain balance and apply force efficiently.
The binding perched atop the new plate is from Tyrolia’s Protector series that includes a separate adjustment for lateral release at the heel. Given the inherently heightened exposure of a woman’s knee to twisting forces, riding on a Protector binding offers an extra measure of protection.
Head has never wavered in its pursuit of the perfect carving ski, which in the U.S. market has been both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, it never hurts to make the benchmark models in an important genre. On the downside, the cult of carving isn’t as popular here as it is in Europe, so the Supershapes have had a harder time gaining sustained traction with Americans.
The 2025 Supershapes all made a major move to a more of an all-mountain mentality, losing some of their exaggerated sidecut and opening up their receptivity to a variety of turn shapes and snow conditions. On the day we dedicated to trying out the latest e-Magnum, e-Rally and e-Titan, we had wonderfully mixed terrain and boot-top crud to play in. Taking the stability on edge that is their hallmark into the muddled world of crud was sheer delight. Unadulterated caving skis aren’t famous for their steering ease in deep snow – with good reason – but the new Supershapes are game changers. The new Supershapes aren’t the only all-terrain skis that can carve, but they are indubitably the best collection of carvers at travelling off-trail.
The 2026 Season
Head deserves buckets of bouquets for pioneering the use of Graphene, the lightest material ever industrialized, and making it the centerpiece of its off-piste Kore collection. But the Kore series never achieved the market dominance its innovative design hoped to inspire, perhaps due to dull cosmetics, maybe how the top edges were easily nicked, possibly the competition simply skied better for a lot of expert skiers. Graphene’s stunning strength-to-weight ratio is still quite useful, and it remains in the latest Kores at the tip and tail, where it allows for a thinner core profile that minimizes swingweight, a palpable virtue in a wide powder ski.
But the central story of the 25/26 Kore series isn’t lightweight materials, but the inclusion of the very substance Graphene’s champions had hoped to obsolete: 2 sheets of Titanal®. The combination of torsional rigidity and longitudinal flex gives skis with Titanal laminates solidity on edge and shock damping where the ski hits the snow, a mix of sensations no other material can match. In the lumpy, inconsistent snow often found off-trail, nothing imparts the same sense of security as two sheets of metal.
The addition of a substantial dose of metal is the lede, but other key aspects of the Kore collection were also altered. Acknowledging their off-trail predilections, the new Kores have more rocker fore and aft, a little less tip flare (-2mm) and a little more shape (+2mm) at the tail. Inside, Koroyd is out, flax is in, for a quieter ride.
The first time Head put Graphene in one of its skis, it was in its Joy women’s series. The new Kore women’s models are a big part of the story this year because the all-white women’s Kores substitute part-poplar, part-PET (recycled wood and plastic) laminates for the Karuba/beech combo in the black (men’s) model. The behaviors of the 25/26 split-personality Kores are different enough to be palpable, yet close enough that men might well prefer the “women’s” version. For example, the softer-flexing white forebody can connect earlier at the top of the turn, a desirable trait that crosses gender lines. It will be interesting to see how the dealer community stocks the two iterations and how consumers tilt one way or the other.
Every model family has a star product, a ski that embodies a sublime mix of Power and Finesse properties. In the last generation of Kores, that distinction went to the Kore 93, and the new 94 has the inside track on retaining the title of “most intuitive.” But the ‘26 Kore 100, in white or black, will give it a good run for its money among strong skiers, and the new Kore 88 will remind long-time Head fans of the venerable Monster 88, the last time Head used metal in an 88.