The Towel-Free™ Standard

Six things a towel can’t do

A blanket meets the Towel-Free™ Standard when adding a towel would change nothing.

To classify for a Towel-Free™ standard, you need to meet six criteria.

First, the towel

Almost everyone starts with a towel. It’s what’s in the cupboard, it’s free, and it feels like a sensible idea until the moment you need it to work.

Then you find out what a towel actually does. It soaks, and then it passes everything on. It slides. It bunches. It lies there on the bed announcing exactly what’s about to happen, which is nobody’s idea of romantic. And afterwards you’re the one standing in the dark with an armful of wet laundry, deciding whether you can face changing the sheets or whether you’ll just sleep around it.

None of that is a towel’s fault. A towel was never built for this. It’s just the only thing most people have ever been offered.

So we wrote down what it would actually take and created our towel-free criteria.

Towel-free criteria – The Six rules

1. Nothing would reach your mattress. Not less. Nothing. A towel holds what it can and then hands the rest straight through to your sheet and your mattress, which is the one job it was brought in to do. A blanket that leaks through hasn’t protected anything. It’s just a slower towel.
2. It holds the whole night, without a top-up. No folding it over. No shifting it across. No reaching for something else halfway. If you have to manage it, you’re still managing it, and not managing it was the entire point.
3. It stays exactly where you put it. A towel travels. It rucks up, slides off and ends up somewhere useless at precisely the wrong moment. Whatever you lay down should still be underneath you ten minutes later, without anyone thinking about it.
4. It doesn’t announce itself. A towel on the bed is a sign. It sets the scene, and not in a good way. A blanket that meets this standard reads as part of the bed, and it stays silent, without crinkling, rustling, or plastic sounds to remind you it’s there. Anything that reminds you it’s there has already interrupted you.
5. You can put it aside with ease and go to sleep. This is the one that matters most, and it’s the one thing that a towel can never manage. No stripping the bed at midnight because the towel leaked through. No shuffling to the dry side. No moving to the couch. You should be able to remove it with one hand, roll over, close your eyes, and deal with absolutely none of it.
6. It’s ready again tomorrow. Machine wash, line or tumble dry, ready to go. In fairness, this is the one thing a towel does perfectly well, and it’s where a lot of waterproof bedding fails because it’s good at holding back water, not so much drying up. If something takes two days to come back, you still need a backup. And the backup is a towel.

GripMe Waterproof Blankets meet all six criteria

GripMe is built to the Towel-Free Standard™: meeting every criterion, not most of them.

Absorbent fleece on top, so it holds the night rather than filling up and giving up. A fully waterproof layer beneath, so nothing reaches your sheet or your mattress. With silicone dots underneath to hold on and stay exactly where you put it. And it’s easy enough to handle and put aside for the night so that you can roll over and go to sleep where you are, which is the only one that really matters.

Washes and dries in a night. Ready again tomorrow.

All of this means you stop planning around it. No towel, no timing, no mental arithmetic about the sheets. Just the bed you already have, and nothing to deal with afterwards until the next morning.

Who created this standard

The Towel-Free Standard™ was created by Banana Passion.

We’re an Australian brand making absorbent waterproof blankets for couples, run from Sydney by founder Meg. We wrote the standard because nobody else had; the category has been selling waterproof fabric for years without ever saying what it should actually achieve for the person lying on it.

How we test it

The six criteria are deliberately plain, so anyone can check them, including you, on the blanket you already own.

Lay it on the bed. Add liquid. Check underneath. Lie on it, move around on it, then see whether you’d be happy to fall asleep on it. Wash it and see when it’s usable again.

No laboratory needed. If a blanket passes all six, a towel adds nothing to it. That’s what Towel-Free™ means.

GripMe Waterproof Blanket (all sizes)

Made of soft and gentle fleece with a high-grip silicone backing.

AU$37.00 – AU$85.01Price range: AU$37.00 through AU$85.01 (incl GST)

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