The Best Beach Towel

I’ve worked for Wirecutter for nearly a decade in various capacities, writing about everything from travel backpacks to camping stoves to luggage to road-trip gear to car-camping tents.

• I currently live on the North Shore of Oahu and spend a large amount of time at the beach working on our guide to the best beach and surf gear.
• I use our towel picks nearly every day after surf sessions, when lying on the beach, or after swimming in Waimea Bay.
• We looked at articles reviewing beach towels from such sources as Good Housekeeping.

This guide builds on earlier work by Jaimal Yogis.

The Brooklinen Beach Towel, made in Portugal, measures 34 by 70 inches, and like most beach towels it has a velour face for you to lie on and an absorbent yet sand-shedding terry weave on the back.

The Brooklinen towel’s material, though, is rated at 600 GSM—higher than our other picks. (GSM stands for grams per square meter; most towels range from 300 GSM to 900 GSM. Anything above 600 GSM is considered premium.) This is a weight and class difference that you can feel in your hands, and when the towel is draped over your body, it’s a pleasure.

True, the Brooklinen towel is more expensive than our budget pick, the L.L.Bean Seaside Beach Towel, and a fancy towel is a luxury that may not be important to everyone. (Ultimately, this remains a piece of woven cotton that you spread out on the sand.) However, the Brooklinen Beach Towel is everything a towel should be, and it’s the one we reach for first.

The L.L.Bean Seaside Beach Towel is a medium-weight towel, measuring 450 GSM (150 GSM less than our top pick). Turkey is known for its towels the way France is known for its wine, and it’s there, in Turkey, that the Seaside Beach Towel is woven from fluffy cotton. It absorbs water very well and remains soft even after multiple washes, and its sewn edge is resistant to fraying.

Measuring 36 by 68 inches, the Seaside towel is big enough for you to sprawl out comfortably in the sun. Also, as long as you lay it down with the fluffy side up (as you would most beach towels), it sheds sand with ease when you need to pack up. Some people may not like its large L.L.Bean branding, however.

One downside to large towels such as the Brooklinen and L.L. Bean towels is that they take up a lot of space in a bag. If you prefer a smaller, lightweight beach towel, the Coyuchi Mediterranean Organic Towel is a luxurious option—and it’s great for travel. It’s “high-low” woven, like a basket, from the softest organic Turkish cotton. It’s the lightest of our towel picks, at 320 GSM—half the weight of our top-pick towel despite being a touch bigger at 39 by 71 inches.

The Coyuchi towel dries faster than the Brooklinen and L.L.Bean towels, and it’s surprisingly absorbent, considering how light it is. It’s also one of the best-looking towels we tested. But it costs as much as our top pick for about half the fabric (by weight, at least), and the colors, which are not fixed with dye-locking chemicals, are likely to fade after prolonged exposure to the sun.

If the Coyuchi Mediterranean towel sounds appealing, but you just can’t see spending nearly $100 on a beach towel, a good alternative is the Huckberry Mediterranean Turkish Towel. It costs less than half the price—sometimes lower when it’s on sale—and it looks a lot more expensive than it is. This Huckberry towel is also Oeko-Tex–certified, which means it should be free of potentially harmful substances, such as heavy metals, formaldehyde, and plasticizers.

One thing to be aware of: Wirecutter staff members who have followed the slightly persnickety care instructions (wash on gentle cycle in cold water with very little detergent and no softener, and, if possible, air dry) report no pilling. However, one staff member treats her Huckberry towels like regular towels, giving them no special treatment, and she says they pilled slightly after just a few washes. The Huckberry towel, which measures 40 by 70 inches, has the lowest GSM rating of our picks, at 155 GSM.

As great as a towel can be if you’re just lying on the sand, it isn’t the best when you’re trying to manage babies on the beach. The Sandy Bumz Beach Mat is a simple, hexagonally shaped polyester sheet, 7 feet across, with an 8-inch-high semirigid frame that acts as a small barrier for debris. (The frame’s wall is light enough that it won’t hurt if you fall on it, but it is strong enough to remain rigid in the wind.)

When you’re packing up, the mat bends into a kind of origami shape, about 10 by 34 inches. Though nothing will keep sand completely at bay, the Sandy Bumz mat is a remarkably simple piece of gear that can help you quickly set up a relatively clean space anywhere.

When it comes to beach towels, most people just want something that works, isn’t hideous, and will last more than a single season. Since 2013, Wirecutter has put in over 30 hours researching towels and interviewing fabric experts before selecting the most promising for further evaluation—testing that we do through lots and lots of daily use. Specifically, we looked for several attributes:

• comfort
• absorbency
• durability
• ability to repel sand

Our earliest testing took place on the beaches of Northern California; since then we’ve done additional testing on Oahu, Hawaii, as well as in Maine and New Jersey. Over the years, our picks have been the towels (or beach covers) that have risen to the top.

A former pick, the Land’s End Dot Beach Towel, didn’t feel as thick and soft as the L.L.Bean towel, and it started dethreading after washing, leading us to believe that it would fall apart more quickly. (Also, the pattern has since been discontinued.)

Over the years, we’ve also tested towels from Deck Towel, Pottery Barn, and Turkish Towel Company.

This article was edited by Christine Ryan.