In secondary school, my father was always threatening to make me pay for the stream of plumbers he constantly had to call to unclog giant clumps of my baby-fine, waist-length blonde hair from the bathtub drain. Now that I’m all grown up and paying for those plumbers myself, I see his point. Regular drain screens let way too much hair pass through — so after a bit of intensive research, I found the best bathtub hair trap £13 can buy: the TubShroom.
You just pop the all-silicone TubShroom into your drain, then pop it out and wipe off the hair coiled at the bottom with a tissue or paper towel to clean as needed. The hair slides right off without any disgusting picking or digging — and takes a grand total of five seconds. The advertisement says to clean it once per week, but I wind up cleaning mine every three days or so. Every time I wipe it off, there’s so much hair that I wonder how I’m not totally and completely bald.
The TubShroom is not the sexiest product there ever was, but it does what it says: allows water to drain while catching stray hairs in a (mercifully) out-of-sight place for easy disposal later. I can’t emphasize it enough. Nothing gets past this little guy — not my boyfriend’s tiny beard hairs (he shaves in the shower) nor the copious amounts of hair that come off my husky when I bathe him at home. Most impressively, it also grabs the gunk that comes along with all that hair — otherwise known as dirt, body oil, and product buildup — before it has a chance to clog your pipes. This little piece of plastic has saved me (and the pipes in my 120-year-old house) at least a thousand bucks in emergency plumbing calls. (Showers never conveniently clog themselves during normal business hours.) The TubShroom beats every other hair catcher by a mile (I’ve tried them all), and you’ll never find yourself showering in standing water due to a drain clog ever again.
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