Note: Laek provided these towels for review.
A little talked about fact in my house: I don’t use your standard bath towel when I shower, instead (since 2017) I’ve been using various towels from hiking/camping offerings to Outlier’s Grid Linen towels. I keep a single thought about this stuff in my head: if certain items are so good for travel/adventure/camping, then why are we not using them at home?
It never made sense to me, so I often try out these products at home, as a way of benchmarking how good they actually are. Laek’s Adventure Towels are no exception — I’ve been using them as my primary towels here at home for weeks now.
They are like a chamois for your body, and they are as weird to use after a shower as that statement makes them sound, and yet highly effective towels. I’m not sure I can go back to my other towels…
Materials & Specs
These towels are a microfiber style towel, and the texture on them is a suede-feel. They are 56” x 31” and come in at about a half a pound. They can be rolled to 8” x 3” to give you a sense of how much they pack down.
The materials are 85% recycled polyester, and 15% polyamide. This, Laek says, allows the towels to absorb up to four times their weight in water.
There’s a single hang loop stitched into the towels at the center on the long edge, and the rest of the towel has a design across it.
Basically: standard sized towel, which feels like suede, and is very thin, so it’s easy to fold/roll to pack away in your bag. Yet it absorbs an impressive amount of water.
Using Them
As mentioned above, I’ve been using these when showering, and packing them out with me when I go on hikes. They are not like any other towel I’ve used.
If you are thinking ’microfiber’ and picturing those cleaning clothes, or cleaning rags — then you are not picturing this towel. In fact, of all the microfiber camp towels I have, they aren’t quite like this. These are very thin and very smooth with a low pile to the material. Describing them as having a suede like finish is apt.
I describe them as a chamois, becuase that’s the effect you have when you dry your body. Most towels will glide over your skin with relative ease. But most towels will also leave behind some amount of moisture. Often, with a fresh 100% cotton towel, the moisture left behind is so minute, that in non-humid climates it evaporates off your skin before you could be bothered to do a second pass with the towel.
These Adventure Towels work differently. Instead they don’t glide effortlessly over your skin. They require some amount of effort to move across your skin, but they leave the areas of your skin the towel passes over very dry. I know that right now you are thinking your towel does the same, but I can assure you it does not.
I’ve never had to do more than a single pass to feel perfectly dry with this towel. It also dries back out incredibly fast, no matter how soaking wet it is. And it takes a lot for this towel to reach saturation — I believe Laek when they say four times the weight of the towel is the abosrbancy. These towels can suck up a lot of water.
They also pack down very small and very light. They are easy to carry, and don’t let dirt or fibers get easily embedded in the pile (likely becuase there is almost no pile). Which means that when you are using these towels to dry off after being in a lake or stream, there’s no worry you are going to have a towel with small bits of leaves or pine needles stuck on it.
I am long past the point of needing to use these towels for testing, but they are still my preferred towel to use.
Overall
If I were designing the perfect towel for travel, outdoors, the beach, or whatever, this is what I would design. It’s full sized, it dries very fast, and it dries your body very well.
I’m a big fan of this towel, and I highly recommend it.