Frogg Toggs Cooling Towel Review: My Secret to Staying Cool

Something you should know about me: I understand heat.

I grew up in a small town in South Texas, and I attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I am intimately familiar with the kind of heat that sits on your chest and makes it hard to breathe. The kind of heat that makes you show up soaked to class, even though it isn’t raining. The kind of heat that you can see radiating from concrete.

And I did six years of marching band — two in high school, four in college — in that kind of heat.

I distinctly remember how hot it was when I performed during one of my first football games at LSU. We played Auburn. My family was visiting. LSU won, 45 to 21. And according to a band friend with an infrared thermometer, it reached 117 degrees on the field of “Death Valley” stadium that day. (No, I don’t know why he had a thermometer down on the field, but if you know anything about band-kid culture, you know that’s exactly something a brass player would do.)

I was reminded of that day recently while testing grills in New York City with a few of my Wirecutter colleagues. We had three ripping-hot propane grills firing on a 101 °F day without a speck of cloud cover to speak of. As I sat there, trying not to melt, I realized that the last time I had felt so hot was at that cursed Auburn game 10 years ago — and I started trying to recall my old tricks for keeping cool in this kind of godforsaken heat.

Many current and ex-band kids, including myself, swear by cooling towels, specifically the Frogg Toggs Chilly Pad Cooling Towel. My high school even kept a large water cooler on the back sideline specifically for dunking them. (My college band did not. I suspect that’s because they hated us, though I can’t prove that.)

Band practices lasted multiple hours long and usually happened during the hottest part of the day. My high school’s “practice field” was actually a concrete parking lot; they just painted field markings over the parking spaces. And yet, as long as I had my Chilly Pad, I knew I wouldn’t be quite as miserable as I would have been otherwise.

Some days, it literally kept me from passing out from the heat. If someone did pass out from the heat, which was not uncommon, another member handed over their Chilly Pad to lay it across their colleague’s forehead.

On this recent particularly hot day in New York, I didn’t have my beloved Chilly Pad from my band days. That was a problem.

So I immediately ordered a Chilly Pad to take to work the next day. (Technically a two-pack, because I’m just a great co-worker like that.) That morning, I rinsed them off, squeezed the water out, and snapped them. I tossed one to fellow writer and grill tester extraordinaire Kathleen Squires and told her to put it around her neck.

She looked at me a little sideways, which is fair. How is this odd towel supposed to help keep anyone cool? Then she put it around her neck, and her look of relief and surprise was almost instant. “Whoa, this actually works!” I know, Kathy, I know. It’s a grill-testing miracle.

It got passed around to everyone present, to many gasps of “You’re right, this is cold!” and “Please, can I borrow this for a few minutes?”

At the end of testing, Kathy said, “This was a game changer. Testing would have been miserable without these.”

The Chilly Pad is a rectangular cooling towel with an oddly smooth, rubbery texture. It functions in the exact same way as a rag or a hat dunked in water, except it actually stays cold, even after extended periods of time in the heat.

The way it keeps you cool is similar to how sweating works, in that heat is transferred from the body to the surface of the skin to evaporate and ultimately cool you off. In this case, there’s another step, as the towel is moving the perspiration from the surface of your skin though the towel and out into the atmosphere.

To use one, first you dunk it in water until it’s soaked, ring the water out so it’s not dripping wet, and give it a good snap. Then, throw it around whatever body part you wish. For me, a Chilly Pad is best draped around my neck or over my head, though it does make me look like I’ve donned an electric-green nun’s habit when I wear it that particular way.

Throughout use, if it starts to warm up, you simply remove it, shake it, snap it one good time, and put it back on. As long as the towel is still properly hydrated, it’ll cool off and be ready to wear again.

If it starts to lose effectiveness and gets a little crunchy on the edges, it’s dried out and needs to be redunked. In my experience, this doesn’t happen until after I’ve used it for a couple of hours, but depending on your environment, the amount of time may vary. If you’re under direct sunlight, it will dry out faster than it would under cloud cover or in the shade.

One important thing to note: You should let a Chilly Pad dry completely before storing it. When dry, the towel stiffens up and holds its shape like an overstarched shirt, which admittedly makes it hard to fold up and pack away. But if you store it when it’s still wet and pliable, it will get moldy. I have seen one too many band kids unpack a Chilly Pad from a slightly damp plastic zip-top bag or the original tube to find an utterly rank, heinous moldy towel, so trust me when I say to just let it dry out and deal with storing the awkward shape.

This cooling towel is not a miracle worker, either. If you fail to hydrate enough the night before a long day in the heat, it won’t save you. (I can hear the mantra “hydrate or die-drate” ringing in my ears now.)

But cooling your face, head, and neck through any means helps you feel cooler, at least, so while your actual core body temperature might not change, you’ll be a lot more comfortable.

This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.