100% Wool Sauna Hat

Name: 100% Wool Sauna Hat
Brand: Brinna
SKU: Sauna_Hat
Price: 55.00 USD
Availability: InStock

$55.00 USD

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A wool felt hat for the sauna, made in Lithuania.

Americans think these are a joke. Lithuanians and Russians have worn them for well over a century, and the reason becomes obvious a few minutes into a hot sauna: heat rises, your head is the highest thing in the room, and your scalp and ears cook before the rest of you does.

Felt insulates. A hat keeps your head cooler than the air around it, which means you last longer on the top bench and come out feeling good rather than lightheaded. It is the cheapest thing you can do to make a sauna better.

Wool also keeps working when it is damp, which matters in a room where everything is wet within ten minutes. Moisture goes into the fiber itself rather than displacing the air trapped between fibers. Cotton goes flat. Synthetic felt is plastic, and we would rather not wear plastic on our heads next to a hot stove.

What "wool felt" usually means

Felt is easy to adulterate, and almost nobody lists what is in it.

A large share of the wool felt sauna hats sold online are a wool-polyester blend. Some are acrylic craft felt with no wool in them at all. You cannot tell by looking, and the listings rarely say.

Ours is 100% wool felt, 4 to 6 mm thick. The hanging loop is the same wool. The sewing thread is polyester, and we will come back to that.

No dyes. No bleach. The color is the color the sheep were.

And no mothproofing

Most wool you buy has been treated against moths. It is invisible, it is applied in the dye bath by whoever runs the dye bath, and almost nobody has to tell you about it. Ours has not been.

This is also why our hat smells like wool. Heavily processed wool does not. If yours arrives smelling faintly of a sheep, that is the point.

The thread

Cotton sewing thread starts at order of 10,000 pieces, which is beyond our current size. Another mill told us linen thread will not survive their sewing machines, and cotton will not hold the seams. So the hat is sewn with polyester thread, for now.

Sewing thread is legally exempt from fiber content labeling in both the United States and the European Union, so nobody would have made us tell you. We are telling you because we think it's the right thing to do.

Materials

100% wool felt. Hanging loop 100% wool. Sewn with polyester thread.
Felt thickness: 4-6mm
Undyed and unbleached. No mothproofing, no shrink treatment.
Made in Lithuania

Dimensions

Weight: 2.1 oz / 60g
Brim opening: about 34" (86cm) around
Height: 9.25" (23.5cm) not counting the hanging loop

One size, and genuinely so. It is a cone rather than a fitted cap: the brim is roughly 11 inches larger around than an average adult head, so the head sits up inside the hat where the felt narrows to meet it. Larger heads sit a little nearer the brim, smaller heads a little higher.

Care

Wash it rarely. Wool resists odor in a way cotton and synthetics do not, and most sauna hats need washing a few times a year at most.

When it does need it: hand wash at 86°F (30°C) or cooler, with wool detergent or none at all. Never machine wash and never use hot water. Felt shrinks and hardens permanently, and there is no undoing it. Ours has had no shrink treatment, which is why this matters more here than on an ordinary wool hat.

Press the water out rather than wringing. Reshape it while damp and dry it over something that holds the shape, like a bowl or a rolled towel. Not flat, and not near the stove.

Hang it outside the sauna between uses rather than leaving it on the bench.

Storing it for a season:

This wool has not been mothproofed. Most wool you own has been, invisibly, and nobody had to tell you.

Put it away clean and dry, in a closed box or bag, with cedar or lavender. A hat left in an open drawer through a warm summer is exactly what moths are looking for.

The smell

A new hat smells of wool. That is what wool smells like before it has been scoured hard, dyed and finished, and most people have never met it. It is not a fault.