Who cares about a bath mat? I mean really. Who cares?
Those were my first thoughts when my editor asked me to write Wirecutter’s guide to them. It’s not that I don’t love this job or my team or this work. I do. But I mean, bath mats? Come on.
Nonetheless, by necessity of employment, I started to think about bath mats. I thought about them while standing barefoot at my sink, brushing my teeth. I thought about them while stepping out of my shower, dripping wet. And, of course, I thought about them at work, polling my colleagues on their preferences, scouring online reviews, and deeply considering what made a bath mat functional, durable, and attractive.
During this time, I remembered a scene from Lady Bird, in which Saoirse Ronan’s titular protagonist speaks with a school nun about Sacramento. “Sure, I guess I pay attention,” Lady Bird reluctantly admits about her hometown. The nun asks, “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”
I thought back to this scene because here I was, spending hours of my life devoting attention to something I cared absolutely nothing for. The truth is, I didn’t love all 20 bath mats that I tested for Wirecutter’s guide, though they did receive my attention. But one mat received more of my attention than the rest, and much to my surprise, I did come to love it.
Staff pick
Abrasive in a good way, this washi-paper-and-bamboo-fiber mat evokes nature. But some people may not like its texture.
My extremely cool friend-slash-co-worker Katie Okamoto is the one who introduced me to the Sasawashi Japanese Bath Mat while I was building a list of all the models I wanted to test. Prior to her mentioning it, I didn’t even know what sasawashi was—a blend of washi paper and bamboo fiber, it turned out. What this means, to the uninitiated, is that the mat has a dry, gritty texture, and it’s incredibly effective at absorbing water (only the stone mats I tested performed better than it, in fact).
But beyond its performance, there is also something brain-tickingly pleasurable about standing on the Sasawashi mat. Rocking on my heels or scraping my feet back and forth on the mat’s papery, abrasive surface creates an ASMR-like sensation—tinglingly good. And its nonslip backing is grippy enough that doing so doesn’t make the mat budge. (Katie, who’s used hers for five years, reports that the backing might have thinned out just a bit, but the mat still works just fine.)
One of the professional hazards of this job is that the people you love most become unwitting panel testers for whatever you’re writing about (when you’re testing something like tequila, this becomes a relationship perk, but not all guides are equally fun). My boyfriend tested most of these mats, too, and as much as I love the Sasawashi mat, he loves it. He has the softest feet of anyone I’ve ever met, which made me worry he’d find it too rough; instead, I bought him one of his own for Christmas.
In Lady Bird, attention connotes love, but attention also means knowing something’s flaws. Certainly, the Sasawashi mat has flaws: Because of its paper-and-bamboo construction, it shouldn’t be thrown in the dryer (though my photo editor did this anyway, and it seems to have survived just fine). It’s more expensive than some of the other mats I recommend in the guide. It also creases when folded, and sometimes its corners curl up. But love means seeing something’s flaws and loving it anyway. I do love it anyway.
Wirecutter’s bath mat guide has about eight picks, and I didn’t have to list a favorite; that’s not what this job calls for. I tried to find the best mat for a number of imagined different people: the person who prioritizes price, the person who loves a bold pattern, the person with lots of kids hopping in and out of the bath. But when I was writing the guide, the person I imagined this mat suiting wasn’t imaginary at all. It was me.
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Daniela Gorny.
