15/16 Ladies Gear Guide

AH this turned out sooooo good!

There is sooo much laziness going on in the ski design industry. When you prototype and design a ski you don't make your prototypes in every size, that would be too cost prohibitive. You pick the most popular size and then you scale up or down for the rest of the sizes. Sounds fine right? What's the problem?

The problem is no one actually does the work to scale their skis proportionally.

Out of all the skis you guys reviewed here only 3 companies even attempted to keep their skis proportionally true to the original design; Atomic, ON3P and Armada.

Take the shredditor series for example. The K2 shredditor 102 has a chargey sidecut at 20m on the 184 version (the size most people would buy). The remedy 102 is the exact same ski, tip width, tail width, waist width, all the same specs, same profile, but... the 154 has a 13m sidecut. What? Just because you are a smaller skier doesn't mean you suddenly want to make 10 times more turns than your larger counterpart. It makes no sense.

If you are keeping the original design intent true in all the sizes, then you absolutely have to resize the tip and tail when you change the length. Yet you rarely see this.

Instead what you get is really lazy resizing where the manufacturer thinks they can keep the tip and tail measurements the same on every length of that ski. This distorts the sidecut. The more sizes the ski comes in, the more the ski is distorted from its original design intent.

As a smaller woman (5'2) I'm often buying the smallest length of a given ski model. This means I get the most distorted version of that ski. For years I couldn't understand why people would rave about certain skis that I thought were absolute crap. It's because I was never riding the same ski as them. Since they were on the more popular size they were riding the true version of the ski, whereas I was riding its mutated bastard.

If you are a smaller woman, there is a good chance your skis are holding you back. Wonder why your guy friends are charging by you, while when you try to attain similar speeds your ski chatters and hooks? It's because you are probably riding some ridiculously stupid 13m sidecut on your lady sized ski.

I have so much rage when I see this bullshit. Ski manufacturers need to get their shit together and stop being lazy when they resize.

Oops, I forgot to mention 4FRNT also makes an effort to resize their skis appropriately.

^^ agree with above. leads me to wonder if sidecut distortion happen with the diffrent sizes in the men's prototypes as well or are females getting the butt end of the deal?

Really great job with the guide though guys! I will definitely be referring to this in the later months!! Great stuff! Skis aside, all the new outerwear looks soo fine

^^Never paid attention to that but always wondered if skis were proportional in that sense. I never looked into it though.



As for the guide. You girls are so fucking rad. I just looked through it all and that was so well done and organized. You guys put so much effort into it and it definitely paid off. So thank you! Its awesome to see all the women's skis right in one place to try to compare them! Pictures, info, insight, all of it was so awesome. This is awesome. Thank you so much!!

Killed it ladies!