To help beat the heat while spending time outside or working out, many people turn to portable fans to provide a cool breeze. Those devices, however, can be cumbersome to carry around and run out of battery fairly quickly. Cooling towels, however, provide quick relief and only need water to work.
After dampening the cloth (about the size of a hand towel) and draping it across your skin, a cooling towel transfers heat away from your body into the air. The towels, which are cold to the touch, offer a refreshing chill that lasts for hours. They roll up or fold up when not in use, making them easy to throw in your bag, whether you’re headed to the gym, a holiday party or elsewhere.
I talked to experts about the science behind cooling towels and their effectiveness, plus rounded up highly rated options I think you should know about.
To activate the chilling effect of a cooling towel you’ll need to: soak it in water, ring out the excess liquid and snap or shake it a few times to circulate air throughout. After doing so, the towel gets cold, which you’ll immediately feel when you put it on your skin. That’s because water is a great conductor of heat, says Dr. Daniel V. Vigil , a sports medicine specialist and health sciences clinical professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
The moisture in a cooling towel’s fabric absorbs heat off your skin and conducts it away from your body into the air through evaporation — hence why cooling towels are often called evaporative cooling towels. As this process plays out for a prolonged period of time, your body temperature decreases, making you feel cooler, says Vigil.
Using a cooling towel mimics the process of what happens when people sweat, according to Gopinath. Our bodies’ main way of dissipating heat is through evaporation, so as moisture (in this case, sweat) moves to the surface of our skin and evaporates, our bodies begin to cool, says Vigil.
Vigil recommends putting a cooling towel on areas on your body where you have big blood vessels, like behind the neck, the armpits and the groin area. When you’re hot, your blood vessels dilate so more blood flows near the surface of your body, making it feel warm to the touch. This is what allows heat to naturally dissipate and cool you off. Putting a cooling towel over those areas helps speed that natural process up by evaporating heat and cooling down your skin.
You shouldn’t — the moisture inside will freeze and the towel will get hard, making it too stiff to unfold and drape across your body. You can, however, put a cooling towel in the refrigerator to make it extra cold.
