Yes do talk to the trainer. I remember a number of my childhood bling dreams being crushed because trainer said “absolutely not” to certain items/certain fashions.
I think I must give my trainer a new gray hair every time I tell her I’ve bought a new show coat—she is very insistent I show whatever I r purchased to her before I go in the ring with it on because she knows I’m fearless with color and bling in the hunters 
I really think y’all have got me wrong on this.
In no way am I saying that my kid is going to ever get to (because we can’t afford it) or learn to (because it’s poor horsemanship) follow every fashion fad or trend in the show ring.
But the simple fact is that small details in rider attire with regard to what is appropriate to be well turned out for the h/j ring absolutely do change and evolve over the years. And the whole reason I started this thread is to try to get mote up to speed on this stuff.
As I’ve said earlier in this thread, when my oldest daughter was riding and showing, the girls were all riding in GPA helmets with the big stripe down the center, thick (and HOT!) Tailored Sportsman breeches, and starchy cotton show shirts in a variety of colors, with monogrammed collars. When I myself was showing in HS & college, I wore rust colored breeches and a velvet hunt cap with a plastic cup that went under my chin which, in hindsight, looked really ugly when my chin strap was buckled.
If my kid went into the show ring wearing any of that stuff now, people would look askance.
So I don’t think it makes my teenager any different than most teenage girls to like or admire a certain look in helmets (she likes ones with that subtle rose gold piping), or me some kind of overindulgent parent who isn’t teaching her daughter about the realities of the costs of this sport for me to be asking whether a OneK helmet style that has the subtle rose gold piping is considered appropriate attire in the show ring circa 2024-2025.
I get exactly what you’re asking. No kid wants to look totally out of date, they all want to fit in. But they also don’t need to have the latest and greatest up to the second current trend. I get exactly what you’re saying. You can never go wrong with elegant and understated. That never goes out of style.
Your call on getting a MIPS helmet is a good one. There’s some excellent data supporting the MIPS technology.
Definitely have her try helmets on unless you already know a particular model will fit. For example, I have a fairly oval head and the CO Halo and Kylo models work for me, but none of the One K helmets fit my head.
Don’t take every comment as directed personally at you on any of these chats :). We often diverge, start responding to each other, or reminiscing about tangential things!
On topic, a bit of rose gold piping probably wouldn’t be a problem. A huge panel of rose gold or the big fat stripe you see on the Halos or some other helmets would be too much for the hunter ring. I’ve seen the One K with the rose gold piping (but not the rose gold front panel) in the hunter ring, just like I’ve seen Samshields with rose gold blazons in the hunters too.
Yes, it’s probably going out of style. If your kid doesn’t care about that and just likes rose gold, then go for it.
If you want to do some hunting online, my friend asked about cheaper options that followed the trends for her teenage daughter doing some novice/low hunters/eq and I pointed her towards a gorgeous Pikeur navy hunt coat with rose gold buttons. I think this was about a year or two ago, so probably still available, but maybe not with the rose gold buttons? Unclear on that one. She gets compliments constantly on it and the quality stands up to many of the coats twice the price. It was somewhere around $250, if I recall correctly.
I find the specific SKUs you reference to FIT VERY DIFFERENTLY.
Find the helmet that fits & has the MIPS that I think you mentioned you’d want to require of your purchase.
If it comes in “more interesting colorways that aren’t inappropriate for Hunter ring” - aka the not big rose gold panel / stripe on some - then AWESOME, kiddo can get some cool piping in a neutral.
(if that is rose gold to them - ok, I wouldn’t consider green or blue or red piping appropriate)
If not - well then they get the plain black helmet that fits their head and the safety standards and when they save up to buy their own helmet with or without MIPS when they’re 18 - coolio.
Maybe I am a salty 34 yr old AA who had parents that stopped driving them to the barn once I could bike alone/ walk / convince by public school bus to drop me off and I cleaned stalls and was a WS for every minute of ride and lease time outside the 1 or 2 lessons my parents would pay for a week. Oh and I wasn’t necessarily bc we didn’t have the money… .lived in huge 4k sq foot house in fancy zipcode, etc. They just didn’t see the value in it & didn’t personally have the emotional bandwidth to support me in something so consuming - they were more focused on their own imploding relationship and keeping their lives semi together.
Kid should be FINE with any show appropriate helmet Mom is getting as long as it isn’t fugly or inappropriate. Kid should be making slide decks about how they’ll support you financially in the old folks home for the amount of privilege your offering and support you’re showing them both financially & emotionally, LOL. That would be me at 15 if I had the FRACTION of the financial and emotional support you’re giving your child.
I started WORKING as a freshman in HS 20 hrs / week minimum afterschool and / or on weekends in addition to ride time, APs, extracurriculars, etc. – I paid for my own helmets good old CO’s from the early 2000s to fit my deep head.
Sheesh, how come a bunch of grown ass women are so involved in whether or not someone else’s kid deserves to have a helmet both fits her and is also aesthetically appealing to her teenaged sensibilities? It seems possible that the kid can have both!
Then do both! LOL no one needs permission for anything.
we all kinda agreed rose gold is on the out (cheugy, even) and a huge panel of it is not appropriate in our opinions for the hunter ring.
we all also agreed that its best to buy the helmet that fits the head and then work thru available color ways.
but Mom can really do whatever she wants and kid can say they don’t like something and ask mom to buy something different!
price isn’t an issue $200 vs $600 is really all the same when you’re showing at A shows - the delta is a rounding error.
Mom knows big colored (even rose gold) panels are probably a no-go, other than that… she’s free to allow her child to have any level of preference she herself is comfortable acquiescing to!
In fact, might be a good learning experience for kiddo to choose a helmet that she likes aesthetically but actually IS inappropriate for the Hunter ring, and see if it impacts her scores and then there can be an AWESOME parent-child convo about cause and effect and decision making that is low-risk and very low stakes.
Except the only way to do that would be to buy two helmets and show in both of them with everything else exactly the same, including the trips and other competitors, to see if the scores and results demonstrate any difference. Lol.
It was a tongue in cheek joke…
ppl can buy whatever they want - if kid likes rose gold panels and WE think its not approp for hunter ring because of X, Y, Z, but since we don’t get judges cards anymore especially not at A shows…
… we are all making shit up based on our own preferences.
Buy whatever you want and if you’re unsure - go conservative or change to the jumpers or ride dressage where an judge may be happy to comment “helmet is loud and distracting and made me realize how much you lean left”
I am curious to hear from “the other side” on this debate. I definitely knew kids whose parents were supportive of any hobby they expressed an interest in. But deep down, I liked my independence, even if it meant I had to miss out on certain cool things/experiences that would have required more parental involvement (riding lessons included). Is that crazy? Maybe that’s just the spin I’ve always put on it to feel better about my life 
I liked my independence mostly because my family was/is batsh*t. My parents are human and they had a lot of trauma going on - thankfully the super problematic one is dead and before their death I was estranged on purpose as an adult. After trying to steal my SS to take on more debt among other highly abusive and illegal things… ya kinda just learn to go no contact / have a restraining order.
Were they emotionally immature and abusive (both were the former and one was definitely the latter) Was a lot of my lived lived by their conditional rules that changed depending on the utter chaos going & their immature reactions to it - yep!
Am I a little bummed that I couldn’t leverage my talent to the fullest back then - sure. It goes beyond my parents having an interest - but I might be an atypical case with a pretty dark turn that my childhood / adolescence took in my early teen years. For those who have had addicts as family members - you might catch my drift.
As an AA it sure would have been nice to have years of experiences at A and higher rated shows and access to horses that weren’t quirky, young, aged, rehab projects where I wasn’t often putting myself at risk just to have access to ride at the level I desired.
I definitely could have gained some psychological and physical muscle memory from having access to nicer leases, owning as a minor, and attending Devon and WEF and WIHS and learning to not pee my pants jumping over 3’3 or up to 1.10m because I didn’t get to experience that regularly as a teenager. I had a few rated shows available to me and I made the most of them.
Ultimately, proximity and chance afforded me the ability to create my own opportunity in dressage land and I have no regrets besides wishing my parents were emotionally more mature and thought a lot harder about whether or not they SHOULD have kids or if they ACTUALLY wanted to have kids WITH EACH OTHER.
Just mostly poking fun at “to rose gold panel for rated hunter shows vs to not rose gold panel for rated hunter shows funded by loving, kind, considerate parents”
just … buy the helmet kid wants and buy a conservative one that fits as a backup… problem solved.
I’m so sorry that was your childhood experience. I feel traumatized just reading it.
To the OP, sorry to hijack your thread.
I will say, when I got to college, I remember there were girls in my dorms whose mothers were on top of all the trends, down to the smallest detail, who were highly involved in getting them ready for rush, and had friends and relatives who wrote letters of recommendation for various sororities.
My mother would have looked at me like I had 2 heads if I even began to describe rushing a sorority to her! I think it’s cultural. But for that sort of thing, socially, it’s a huge leg up to have a parent who knows what’s up.
This thread reminds me of the horse show equivalent of rushing a sorority—that’s the reason I mention it. I can see how there’s a world where the rose gold piping DOES matter, and how, if you’re going to participate, you might as well go all in.
If the starting price for a competitive horse is 2x the average Americans salary, I don’t think it’s silly to care about how the rider looks.
This is a world I never have and never will live in but a $1,000 belt or jacket really is a drop in the bucket when you look at annual or even monthly expenses.
If you’re going to drop the money, picking what’s “in” makes a lot of sense.
Exactly - thats why I said if this thread warrants 70+ messages back and forth about “whats appropriate vs what kid wants stye wise”…
buy BOTH - and have the conservative one as a backup for when trainer has “Opinions”
If you can’t afford MAX ~$2k on a fashiony helmet and a traditional/ conservative hemet then consistent A Hunter shows probs aren’t the best financial decision - as the the helmet is life saving equipment and the $$ should be prioritized there,
Everyone who rides – at A shows or elsewhere – needs an approved, well-fitting helmet. That is life-saving. A $1,000 or $2,000 “fashiony” helmet is no more lifesaving than something less trendy but equally up-to-standards in terms of safety. Take a look at the Virginia Tech helmet study. Some of the best performing helmets were not at all expensive.
The idea that someone who can’t afford a couple of thousand dollars extra to have a fashionable spare helmet for schooling has no place at A shows is either poorly constructed satire or incredibly tone deaf and indicative of badly misplaced priorities.
I am the OP (the mom) in this thread, and I seriously can’t believe the debate it’s aroused.
I never shared anything about my own background when I started this thread, but I feel compelled to now.
I was that kid who NEVER had the fancy horses or ponies. I never even had proper lessons. But I mucked stalls, took part time jobs, and worked my a** off to afford to even show at the 4-H level (and I did very well - making it to regional and national competitions on horses I raised and trained myself).
My riding apparel and tack were always second hand. My parents would buy me super inexpensive ponies with potential that I, by age 13 or 14 (because I was small for my age), was able to break and train on our own farm to then sell at a profit to families who could afford much more expensive, pretty much push button, small and medium ponies for their own kids to take to on to rated shows at which I could never affford to show.
I was able to show on my intercollegiate equestrian team, which was a dream come true for me because for the first time in my life I had access to real trainers and nicer horses than I’d ever had the chance to ride previously.
So anyone who thinks that I am some super entitled parent from an entitled equestrian background who just wants her kids to have whatever the latest fad is doesn’t know anything about me or my background as a rider myself - how I grew up.
And FYI, a OneK Defender helmet does not cost $600 or 1k (those are the prices I am seeing thrown around in this thread as what it sounds like people have assumed I was suggesting spending on a new show helmet for our 14 year old).
We just purchased hers (with the MIPS rating I insisted on and yes, the perhaps “cheugy” extremely subtle rose gold piping she really, really wanted) for $304 + tax from Dover Saddlery.
I’m glad you got her helmet! She’ll love it. 
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