The Bottom Line: We are disappointed to find some of the claims, such as the soaked carpet, are not entirely true. That being said, we're pretty impressed with what it DOES do (that is, absorb a LOT of liquid). If you have the need for it, the ShamWow is a great product. However don't be fooled into thinking it is as versatile as the commercial claims.
Reviewed by: Justin ObermanReviewed on: 4/27/2009 3:54:51 PM
What it Claims to Do: If you're reading this review, you've probably already seen Vince sing the praises of the ShamWow in his TV infomercial. The claims he makes are pretty "wow" - that the ShamWow can hold up to 20 times its weight in water, that it wont drip and that it can be used wet or dry. These claims seem pretty incredible, and we at infoNOTmercial.com decided to find out just how truthful they are. What We Found: In the infomercial, Vince uses the ShamWow to absorb an entire bowl of water. We found this worked pretty well. The ShamWow absorbed an entire cup of water from our bowl and did not even drip. The ShamWow did not perform as well, however, when we used 2 cups of water... it absorbed almost all of the water, but this time it dripped pretty heavily. This is still better than most home paper towels. When we tried to see how many paper towels it would take to absorb the same amount of water as the ShamWow, we found that we needed 12 paper towels. Furthermore, the paper towels dripped more than the ShamWow did. We then tried the carpet test. In the infomercial, Vince claimed that the ShamWow can absorb both the liquid in a carpet AND the liquid that seeps onto the surface beneath it. We found that this worked better than we expected... but not as well as Vince claimed. There was still some water beneath the surface of the carpet and the carpet itself was slightly damp. What's more, we found what seems to be some creative video editing in the infomercial. If you look really closely at the infomercial between 0:44 and 0:46 seconds, you can see that the liquid that had spilled beyond the corners of the carpet magically disappears before Vince wipes it up with the ShamWow. One nice thing about the ShamWow - when we tried to clean up a spill from a table, the ShamWow actually absorbed the water. Since the regular towels did not absorb as much, the towels just pushed a lot of the water around the table, making the area of the spill even larger and sometimes pushing some of the spill off the table. We found that the small blue ShamWows were not particularly useful, so expect to only use the large orange ones if you purchase this set. The infomercial also does not mention that even though the ShamWow is machine washable, it cannot be placed in the dryer. To top it off, the ShamWow takes an incredibly long time to dry. It's a good thing the ShamWow still works when damp. In the infomercial, the ShamWow beautifully dries a wet sweater and wipes a car dry. We tested these, and found nothing remarkable about the ShamWow. The sweater was still wet and the car had streaks that a real chamois would not have left. The Bottom Line: The ShamWow can definitely hold a lot of water. However, don't expect any of the miracles claimed in the infomercial. Drying sweaters, preventing mildew from carpet spills, and wiping cars are not very good uses for the ShamWow. Plus the ShamWow takes a very long time to dry. The ShamWow is definitely a very absorbant towel, but not much more.