If I had to list my prized possessions, my Tweezerman tweezers probably wouldn’t make the list. Yet they’re an item I take on every vacation or holiday trip, an item—like the household pair of scissors or the roll of Scotch tape—I always make sure I can find.
I should not have to profess my love for a thing that does exactly what it’s designed to do. But every pair of tweezers I have owned before has failed to adequately perform its most basic task: gripping the tiny thing I want pulled.
If you’ve ever owned a generic drugstore tweezer, you know what I’m talking about: the Sisyphean cycle of positioning, pinching, pulling, and failing to pull. This is exactly the experience I expected the first time I used the Tweezerman Slant Tweezer while visiting a friend. I positioned, I pinched … I plucked. Veni, vidi, vici.
Never have I been so quickly sold on a product.
Top pick
These sharp, precise, and durable tweezers have been Wirecutter’s top pick for over a decade.
The trick of the Tweezerman Slant—Wirecutter’s top tweezer pick for more than a decade—is in its slanted, thin, sharp (but not too sharp!) tips. The angle lets you see what you want to grab, the thinness lets you get under it, and the sharpness lets you grab it. Plus, the point is pointy enough to do some digging if necessary. It’s as simple as it is rare: The Tweezerman Slant just works.
When you think of a “buy-it-for-life” item, you think Le Creuset. You think leather tote. You think handmade cable-knit sweater from a 200-year-old Irish textile company. You don’t think $20 tweezers. But in its seven-year reign as my one and only pair of tweezers, the Tweezerman Slant has stayed sharp extraction after extraction, nabbing stray hairs and ingrown hairs, splinters, and bee stings. I don’t foresee ever needing to replace it.
In my Before Tweezerman Era, I didn’t think of tweezers as a travel essential (pluck before you pack!). But that was when my tweezers barely worked. Now I carry the Tweezerman Slant around for the same reason I have a loop of floss in my purse: When something is stuck in your body that does not belong, it’s hard to think about anything else. A singular rogue hair—weird, spiky—can drive me to total distraction, never mind a splinter or a sea urchin spine. There’s enough stuff to be stressed about while you’re traveling, like whether you’re on the right bus or how to sleep with a bar directly beneath your Airbnb.
As a bonus, the Tweezerman Slant comes in lots of fun colors, including medicine-cabinet chic (er, silver), mist blue, and neon purple. In a travel tweezing emergency, my bright pink pair is a beacon in my toiletry bag.
If the Tweezerman Slant has flaws, they are few. The company’s free sharpening service becomes less free after you pay to ship your tweezers, though I don’t anticipate needing the service anytime soon. (Plus, you can sharpen them at home, apparently, if you’re confident in your skills.)
Although I like the versatile slanted tip, which is a brow-plucking superstar, if your usual tweezing tasks involve more digging than plucking, you might be better off with the long, pointy-tipped Tweezerman Point Tweezer (formerly called the Ingrown Hair/Splintertweeze), another Wirecutter pick. And a word of warning: If you see a Tweezerman pair super cheap, it could be an inferior counterfeit.
Best for
This design is ideal for tweezing tasks that involve more digging than plucking, such as removing ingrown hairs, splinters, or ticks.
Life is full of frustrations big and small. Many things that should work do not. A toilet won’t flush. Wireless headphones refuse to connect. Elevator music loops as you wait on hold, once again, in the bureaucratic seventh circle of hell.
It’s nice when something that seems like it should be easy actually is easy. Tweezerman tweezers don’t make my list of prized possessions for precisely the reason I love them: They’ve worked so well for so long that I take them for granted. As with so many well-designed things, mostly I don’t have to think about them at all.
This article was edited by Hannah Rimm and Maxine Builder.
