Tesalate Towel Review

When you’re going camping, something that is generally a necessity, but also takes up a lot of room is your towels. Normal towels, whether they are bath towels or beach towels, tend to not fold up easily, making you need to find a place with a lot of space to put them. Not only that but they can take ages to dry, and that’s if you have someplace to hang them.

Because of all these reasons, we are always on the lookout for a more practical towel for camping and caravanning. Something quick dry, with a good size but can fold up small for storage.

Enter the Tesalate towel. Tesalate asked us if we’d like to try them out. They’re touted as a sand-free, ultra absorbing and rapid drying beach towel. Designed to dry fast and fold up small. Sounds perfect, right?

So we tested some out. In our review we’ve looked at the sandyness (is that a word?), how they work and whether they actually do dry fast. Here’s what we found.

Size

Their regular towels are 160cm x 80cm, which is bigger than a regular bath towel and about normal for a beach towel as well as an XL version which is 160cm x 160cm (imagine putting two beach towels together).  They also have a workout towel which is 100cm x 45cm.

We actually ended up with one each of the beach towel and XL towel.

The design

Ok, I got to choose the towel designs as you do when you get anything online and I ended up going with the alchemist and bora bora patterns. I figured I’d like what they looked like, but you never can be 100% sure if something will look the same as the picture.

I will say the colours are gorgeous and live up to what you see on your computer screen. They come in a variety of styles and whether it’s beachy, floral, bohemian or just a cool pattern I’m sure you would be able to find a style and colour you liked.

Material

Tesalate towels are made of a microfibre fabric they call ‘absorblite’. I won’t lie, when I got the towel out of the little bag it came in I wasn’t sure about it. It felt rough, and my first thought was that it was not going to be comfortable dying myself with it, let alone trying to get the kids to use it.

To test it out, I used it for a week as my regular shower towel (thanks lockdown and no beach trips). I was pleasantly surprised. It feels different than a normal towel, but not rough like I expected. It’s not as snuggly as wrapping yourself up in a luxury cotton towel, but it certainly isn’t a bad experience.

Drying Ability

I was a bit unsure about how well the towels would dry given how thin they are and the different feeling material compared to regular towels. I used the towel after my shower for a week to test it out and I must say it absorbs the water fantastically and takes the moisture off your skin the first time without having to go over parts of your body time and time again. They even have a little ring to hang them on to a hook for easy hanging, so you don’t have to try and find a clothesline or rope.

They claim to dry in half the time of a regular towel, and I would probably believe that claim. They are thin and light and hanging up on a hook on the back of our bathroom door, it definitely dried a lot quicker than our regular towels.

Packing

So the true test of a good towel for camping is not only how it functions, but how small it can pack away to save some space. This is where the Tesalate towel is truly useful. You can fold it or roll it into about a third of the space of a regular towel. This is a game changer. You can have a family of 4 towels taking up about the same amount of space as one towel previously. They are also significantly lighter than cotton towels. When you’re short on cupboard space and trying to be as light as possible, every little bit helps.

Even the XL towel is compact, being about half the size of our other beach towels, and yet when unfolded you have double the usable area. Perfect.

Usability

Of course, you’re going to use it as a beach towel, but they are also good as a normal bath towels. The fantastic thing about the XL towel is it is big enough to use as a picnic blanket. And the same technology that allows sand to fall off it also allows crumbs and other stuff to not stick as badly as a normal picnic blanket as well. They are also much easier to wash and dry than a traditional picnic blanket, which is great when the kids knock things over.

Overall

I don’t know if I’d use them as an everyday bath towel, but Tesalate towels are a great solution for the beach and camping. They’re pretty much everything you need in a towel for caravanning and camping – they pack small without compromising towel size, dry quickly, don’t get covered in sand and dirt and if you get a big one, they make a great picnic blanket too.

They’re not cheap at $89 a towel ($149 for the XL) but they are pretty much the perfect solution for travelling.