Emigre Wash Bag Review

When you first get your hands on the Emigre Wash Bag, you think, darn, if that isn’t one of the most sleek-looking toiletry bags I’ve ever seen. A nice-looking facade is nice, but we can’t help but wonder how well it will perform while traveling and if it lives up to its expensive price tag. Let’s dive in!

External Components

The exterior materials are crafted from Robic nylon, which utilizes recycled materials. We’ve seen this fabric on other bags from Emigre, like their Backpack, and they held up well there. Plus, they’re bluesign® certified materials, which means they’re sustainable. What’s not to like about that?

The wash bag uses YKK zippers, which are the cream of the crop. Seriously, these things glide like a cloud! The pulls are metal, which gets a little slippery when wet. While this is fine for most intents and purposes, it can slow you down in certain situations, if you know what we mean. Oh, you don’t?

Well, let’s say you just got into the shower. It was a long day; your mom made you go inside every single church you saw in Indianapolis, which was a lot. Plus, you went to The Tamale Place and got hot sauce in your hair. You finally got into the shower, only to realize your shampoo was still in your toiletry bag. When you go to get it, your hands are all wet. This water quickly transfers to the metal pulls from your hands, making them slippery. Make sense?

There’s an Emigre logo on the top right of the pack’s front. It’s sleek and doesn’t shout at you, which we dig. Emigre does well to keep its gear minimalistic, so you might have thought it was an accent if you didn’t know it was a logo.

There’s a hidden hanging hook on the back of the pouch. It pops out and snaps back into place with stretchy elastic. It hangs nicely and doesn’t get in your way when you aren’t using it. Sometimes, it’s hard to get it to come out of hibernation. We found that you can remedy this by slightly overhanging the hook on the entrance to the cave, so to speak. It doesn’t look as sleek, but it makes grabbing the hook much easier.

Apart from that, there isn’t anything else going on around the exterior of this pouch. Time to jump inside!

Inside The Wash Bag

The bag’s interior is broken up into two compartments. The frontmost section, closer to the logo, has two elastic pockets against the front panel three adjacent to the center. All five are crafted from stretchy mesh with a flexible topper. Because of the elastic, you can keep larger items from bouncing around in the main compartment. However, smaller items can still tumble out if the going gets rough enough.

There’s a fair amount of space between the two sides for extra gear. Most of the area isn’t muddled with organization, so you may have to sift through your toiletries or bring additional organization of your own.

In the other compartment, we have a similar layout. Against the outer side, there’s a zippered pocket. It is made of stretchy mesh, so you can stow larger items inside even though it has a zipper on the top. However, this is also the only place to lock down smaller gear inside this toiletry bag. On the other side are two stretchy mesh pockets with elastic toppers, similar to the first compartment we went over. There’s a lot of leftover space here, too, so you can stuff it full if needed.

That’s it; there’s no more organization. Overall, it works, but you might want more places to stow your gear, especially considering how large this pouch is. It’s a simple design, which some might desire; however, we don’t feel like we’re getting enough for the price.

At the time of writing, the Emigre Wash Bag retails for $140. Although it has a different style, the current highest-rated toiletry bag on Pack Hacker is the Aer Travel Kit 2. It offers functional organization in a slightly larger size than the Emigre, and comes in at $49 as of this review. For that price, you could nearly get three of them for what you’d spend on the Emigre. We understand that everyone has preferences, but the price is hard to get over.

There’s something to be said about how well the Emigre works with other gear from the brand, like the Backpack; however, in testing, we didn’t find that it functioned any better than other toiletry pouches that we’ve tested. We dig how sleek it is, the minimalistic organization, and being left to our own devices, but travelers must decide whether the price is worth it.