BellyLaf Grippees Wash Mitts Review

BellyLaf's Grippees wash mitts have a little row of soft silicone dots across the palm and thumb to help you control your slippery baby during bath time. The top of the bath mitt is intended to be used in place of a wash cloth, and the soft bamboo and cotton blend certainly makes a good one. Grippees are durable, the animal designs on them are cute, and they can be more handy than holding on to a wash cloth to clean up your baby. In general, though, dropping the baby in the bath doesn't seem to be a huge problem, according to the parents I've asked, so the gripping part may not be a necessity.

I love the bamboo and cotton blend that BellyLaf used for Grippees wash mitts. It's soft, machine washable, and eco-friendly. It's also really durable. I threw a set of Grippees in the wash with my family's regular laundry over the course of 2 weeks, and they still look great and feel soft. The seams are still solid and all of the gripping dots are still in place.

The gripping dots are very soft. They don't have rough edges, and they seem to be attached pretty well to the mitts.

The animal characters on the mitts are cute and colorful. They should hold a baby's attention if you need some sort of distraction during bath time. You can choose from a crab, whale, jellyfish, starfish or blowfish.

The mitten shape may be a bit easier for some parents to use for bathing baby versus holding a separate washcloth. I also like that Grippees are sized generously, so dads with bigger hands could use them, as well.

For parents with smaller hands, the size of the mitts may actually make it harder to hold onto baby. The excess material sliding around on my hand made me feel less secure in my grip. Also, the smaller size of my hand made it so that the gripping dots sat very low on my palm, almost sliding down toward my wrist. Only the thumb dots were very effective for actual gripping for me. My husband's larger hand fit the mitt much better and the gripping dots hit in more effective places for him.

At about $17 for one set of wash mitts, Grippees are on the expensive side for something with which to wash your baby. Granted, they're made of a decent material and they are durable, but they probably wouldn't make the cut in tight budgets.

While I think Grippees could be handy to use instead of a regular washcloth, they're expensive to buy just for that purpose. If you want a more luxurious washcloth option, though, the fabric blend on Grippees is very nice, and it will hold up well in the wash. For those who value sustainable materials, the bamboo fabric is a great choice.

I never had a big problem with my daughter being so slippery that I required a product just to combat the slipperiness, so I asked a moms group to weigh in on the subject in case I just had an abnormally un-slippery child. The general consensus was that babies are bathed in baby baths, or in bath seats, or in some way that they are supported, so being slippery isn't a big deal. These moms didn't ever feel like their babies were at risk of being dropped during bath time, and hence didn't think they'd buy bath mitts to grip their babies.

That said, there must be people in the world who do worry about their babies being slippery in the bath, or this product wouldn't exist. If you're one of those people, Grippees may very well work for you if you have average size hands or larger. If you have very small hands, I wouldn't suggest using Grippees for anything other than the washcloth purpose, because the excess material may actually make it harder for you to hold onto baby.