How do you make a helmet specifically for gravel, and POC's design team has clearly taken these two rules and, rather maddeningly, applied them to one of the more aero offerings in the brand's helmet range, the Omne helmet.

Does one need a dedicated gravel helmet when so many of the better road bike helmets work perfectly well, POC thinks so. We don't think so, but that's not going to stop us from testing to find out.

The POC Omne seems to be a test bed for the brand to try out some slightly different ideas. The standard Omne is a very high-performance helmet, but there is also the solar-powered Omne Eternal, a collaboration with Omne Air Rapha, the Omne Lite, and the Omne Ultra, which is loaded with adventure-oriented features.

POC describes the helmet as "embodying the spirit of gravel. If the spirit of gravel is, as I suspect, about strapping things to other things in increasingly aesthetic ways, then POC has much to gain in my favor with this claim. The standard Omne chassis could be upgraded with a Velcro patch on one side and an ID patch that would be easy for riders to see. There is also a buckled strap running vertically on the rear, which I believe is to hold the rain cover in place, but it is hard to tell from the photo and is not clearly marked anywhere.

The last gravel-specific technology is the Recco reflector. This is commonly found on high-end snowsports jackets and allows mountain rescue teams to more easily locate your (hopefully still alive) body if you should be caught in an ill-timed avalanche. I don't know if this would be useful in everyday applications, but for those attempting glacier crossings such as those described in the guidebook Rough Stuff Cycling in the Alps, it could mean the difference between life and death. Perhaps not so much for the local club run.

A feature more useful on a daily basis than the Reco Reflector is the inclusion of MIPS, as with the other helmets in the Omne series and most of POC's higher-end helmets.

I am being sarcastic here to some extent. It is perfectly reasonable to want to strap on a head strap. But unlike the best cargo bib shorts, which boast the capacity to hold a sizable collection of gravel-specific accessories, bandanas, bananas, snacks, tubeless patch kits, etc., the Omne Ultra's cargo cage is not quite as voluminous.

It could hold a glow stick in case of a rescue, or a flashlight from the local hardware store when the dynamo's front light goes out at the end of a 10,000 km race. You could keep a banana on a lanyard and forget about it until you really need the calories, or you could keep a neatly folded emergency blanket in case you get caught in an avalanche on the way to the cafe. If you are more safety-minded, you can strap a spare helmet to your helmet so you don't have to sacrifice skull protection if your main helmet gets caught in an avalanche. In this case, the lightweight Omne Lite may be the best choice.

Further testing may find a valid use for the gravel feature (no, I'm not going to cross a glacier!). . Progress and product development, in whatever form it takes, is not possible without innovation. Such products are easy targets for mild teasing, but they do raise valid questions about the specificity of the product. Is there a need for gravel-specificity in general?" or, perhaps more importantly, will the rise in popularity of ultra racing, especially among amateurs, lead to a spate of ultra-specific products?