In HEMA, protecting your head is of utmost importance. If you fight, you will get hit, there is no way around it. To make masks truly safer, we need data and we needs lots of it.

Whether you’re doing sabre, longsword, side-sword, rapier, dagger, or any other weapon or combination, sooner or later your bell will get rung. With a better mask you could dampen that bell. It is fair to say that construction a mask up to the rigors of HEMA is not easy and it surely can’t be done based on guesswork or personal experience. We at Arming Guild like to approach problems with data and deliver pragmatic results.

With this in mind, we are proud of having designed our masks with HEMA in mind. We started where we felt the biggest improvements could and needed to be made – the padding. We would like to take it further, but we cannot do so without data.

And that’s where you, the HEMA community come in! So please take a few moments to fill out this survey. It will let us know where we need to focus the most.

In it, you have options for inputing information on a single mask, as well as several. If you run a HEMA club, please know that information on as large a number of masks as possible will help us tremendously. We have divided the mask into 9 areas, and would like to know where dents happen most frequently. There is more information in the survey itself. However, if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Thank you for taking the time to do this. Together, we will make HEMA safer for everyone! Hopefully, this survey will give us some actionable data. Of course, it is not the last of surveys we have planned. There is so much we want to know! So many aspects of our gear we can improve! We are commited to making HEMA safe and accessible to everyone, but we can only do so with your help!