Tushy is a maker of bidet attachments and bathroom products that’s on a mission to reduce waste in our bathroom habits while maintaining – or even improving – hygiene standards.
It’s a brand that’s been making waves in the likes of Business Insider and TechCrunch since it was founded in 2015. Here, we take a closer look at the brand, to show you everything you ever wanted to know about Tushy, but never knew you needed to know.
First thing’s first, Tushy does not sell bidets.
Confused?
It sells bidet attachments. Big difference. Here’s the thing. Most bidets are entirely separate bowls from the toilet. You use the toilet, adopt a john Wayne stance and crab-walk your way to the bidet.
There, an entirely separate water supply from the one in your toilet, sprays up at butt and/or nether regions, cleaning them with water rather than with yards and yards of toilet tissue.
It’s good, and ecologically sound, but it’s also a two-stage process, when really speaking you only need one stage.
That’s the Tushy message – one bowl, one stage, less plumbing, and still reducing the environmental costs involved in using toilet tissue to wipe your butt.
Also, while we’re in the… erm… area, it stands to reason that a mini-shower is going to be helpful in keeping your butt cleaner than just wiping, too. That right there is self-care by bidet.
The way Tushy attachments work, you get clean water out of the toilet, so you just sit and let the attachment do its thing, without the second bowl and the crab-walk.
Tushy knows it’s operating in an area that’s private and intimate to most people, and therefore potentially an area ripe for embarrassment, taboo, and even, for some people, humiliation. Yet it’s an area that’s common to everyone.
We all use the bathroom, and most people in the Western world still chiefly get clean afterwards by using toilet tissue.
Tushy adopts a somewhat ‘cheeky’ (Yes, we went there, it’s in the spirit of the company!) persona and fills its website with literal toilet humor to try and put people at ease with this practically universal experience, and focus them on the real, environmental benefits of cutting down our use of toilet tissue.
You want to do some bathroom math?
On average, each and every American uses 57 sheets of toilet tissue.
Per day.
That’s 399 sheets per week.
Or 20,748 sheets per year.
Per butt.
There are 331,449,281 people in the US as of 2021, according to the Census Bureau.
Let’s cut the figure to size to take notice of all those who may be diapered at any time, or who may use alternatives to traditional, non-environmental toilet tissue. Say 330 million people. That’s 6.8×1012 sheets of tissue.
Taking the conservative estimate that you get 20,000 sheets of tissue out of one tree, that’s over 342 million trees-worth of tissue consumed each year to keep American butts clean.
Something needs to change there before the world burns.
Tushy Overview
It’s true that Tushy itself offers bamboo toilet tissue, which results in the cutting down of precisely zero trees, but anything that helps wean Americans off a dry wipe will help save the world.
Another useful statistic refers to water usage. Standard bidet usage takes around 55.5 gallons of water in any given week. A Tushy bidet attachment will give you equivalent butt-cleaning power with just 1.3 gallons of water per week.
So, there’s a degree to which Tushy looks like a supplier of simple technological solutions to the way that what we do in the bathroom impacts the planet.
And then it goes the extra mile. Tushy, recognizing and owning our collective Western privilege in that we have bathrooms and can afford to worry about the sparkling cleanliness of our butts, directs a portion of its profits toward Samagra.
Sa-what-now? It’s a non-profit organization building toilet facilities in India. The aim is to help communities lead healthier and more dignified lives.
There’s also a US health issue to talk about, and which Tushy can help to tackle. There are 30 million annual cases of hemorrhoids, UTIs, yeast infections, anal fissures, and anal itching in the US each year. Dry paper (and even wet wipes) help exacerbate those cases.
The dry paper doubly so, because a) you’re rubbing something pretty rough (yes, even you with your 6-ply quilted aloe vera tissue – is it still basically paper? OK then…), and b) you’re not getting rid of as much as you think you are.
You’re getting rid of some, to be sure. But you’re also pretty much just… moving the residue around.
Wet wipes get rid of more, but also, thanks to the wetness, move things around without necessarily getting you that much cleaner.
Imagine playing the best game of squash in your life. You’ve run all over that court, your headband is soaked through, your shirt has dark stains on it, your face is dripping with the sweat of your effort. You’ve had a great game – yay you.
When you get back to the changing room, do you just wipe yourself down with a dry towel and head on out about your day?
No! You take a well-deserved shower before re-introducing yourself to human society. That’s not only self-care, so you don’t feel grimy, it’s social consideration for other people.
Same deal with a bidet. Your butt’s had the game of its life, it’s done what it’s there to do, it deserves a Good Butt medal.
You’re just going to toilet tissue it and go back to the world?
No! Give it the shower it deserves. But ideally, give it the shower it deserves without plumbing in a second bowl and wasting gallons of water. The Tushy bidet attachment option means you can have the best of all possible worlds.
In case you’re in a hurry, here’s the breakdown of our Tushy review.
Pros
- Works to help hygiene, health, and the state of the planet
- Bidet attachments fit a range of toilet shapes, for maximum convenience
- Attachments are available in several colors
- Comes with a 90-day return option
Cons
- Price could be prohibitive compared to similar products
- Customer service is not great – you can only contact the company by email
Why you should trust us
Our team has spent over 15 hours extensively testing and researching the best wellness products, including Tushy. Our goal is to find the best brands who care about your well-being and help people live better lives. We evaluate products based on their quality, effectiveness and customer support.
We often ask ourselves a simple question: would we buy the product for ourselves and recommend it to our family and friends? This review is reviewed and thoroughly vetted by Amy Bells, our in-house wellness and self-care expert and product tester herself!
Bidet Attachments
Don’t panic – Tushy only makes two bidet attachments, so it’s not a decision that’s going to tax you for years. It’s also made a fairly straightforward choice by quite how nicely you want to treat your tushy.
The Tushy Classic will get every bit of the job done, in a no-nonsense, coffee-to-go style that will have you back at your dinner table in just minutes. The Tushy Spa on the other hand gives you a little bit more pampering. You might want to bring a book.
The joy about the Tushy attachments (nope, there’s no way that doesn’t sound weird) is that they’re simple to install. Neither requires electricity or complex plumbing.
All you’re doing is connecting the attachment to a water supply. Let’s take a look at both options and see which one’s for you.
Tushy Classic
The thing about a bidet attachment is that unless the people who made it know what they’re doing, things can get messy in a hurry.
Tushy knows what it’s doing. The Classic has both pressure and angle control, meaning you can get the cleaning you need, whether it’s a simple salad day or a big Mexican beanfeast evening.
The nozzle is lowered for use, and when it’s done its job, it slides away into its private space, possibly to think about what its life has become, but certainly to self-clean, meaning you don’t have that delightful job to worry about.
Here’s a thing. The water in the tushy Classic is the same temperature as the water in your cold tap.
Now, in the summer in Florida or California, that might be just dandy. If you’re contemplating getting a Tushy and you live in Chicago or Alaska… you might want to spring for the Tushy Spa. Just saying.
As a practical patron saint of optimism, Tushy on its website proclaims that a cool spray of water on your hiney is “actually really refreshing.” Feel free to raise a skepticaleyebrow – we did.
Given that women are advised to use a bidet after at least heterosexual, penetrative, unprotected sex, feel free to raise that eyebrow even higher.
The pleasure of cold tap water on the butt is very much a regional and seasonal thing. If you can’t stand it all year round, do the self-care thing, and upgrade to the Spa.
We’re betting that the color of the attachment and the color of the control knob are probably way down your list of concerns when getting a bidet attachment. Still, if matching your bidet to your bathroom is important, the Tushy Classic comes in a whole range of options.
You can get it in white, with a knob in either bamboo, silver, gold, bronze, platinum, or even the faintly worrying gunmetal. (Worrying because it’s a projectile spray about to hit your butt with some pressure, so having a gunmetal button to start the fun feels unusually apposite.
Or, if you’re less keen on white, you can get the Classic in blue, with a bamboo knob, pink with a white knob, or for a touch of Eighties retro-chic, black with a gold knob.
In the event that the knob of your choice is sold out when you try to get it, Tushy has an email notification system, so if you want, you can put yourself on a waiting list for a bamboo knob…
Tushy Spa
If you’re looking for a bidet attachment that’s extra kind to your butt, you’re looking for the Tushy Spa. Extra kind how? Extra kind with a temperature control knob, that’s how.
The Tushy Spa comes with a 9-foot hot water connection to facilitate the warmer water option, but beyond that (and the fact that naturally, it needs to be within reach of a sink to work), it’s very similar to the Classic.
Pressure nozzle? Check. Angle control? Check. Self-cleaning? Check. But waaaaarm, in the middle of a November Chicago night, rather than necessarily a cold blast of water up your 3 AM fundament.
If the Classic is already an ecological, hygiene and health revolution in how to deal with getting your butt clean after a bathroom visit, the Spa is a revolution with an extra kiss of kindness.
Color options? All exactly the same as the Classic, though likewise, you might have to wait a while to get the precise color combination that matches your bathroom.
Bathroom Products From Tushy
Tushy Ottoman
Here’s a thing. The way we in the West get rid of our bodily waste is not only inefficient, it can lead to issues with our butts and our digestive tracts.
Technically, the most efficient way to use a toilet is to squat, rather than to sit, putting pressure on several nerves and giving rise to issues like constipation.
A study in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology reported that using a footstool to change the stress points when we sit down on a toilet improved the experience for 71% of people. So, footstools are good for your overall wellness, as well as your digestive and butt health.
Enter, the Tushy Ottoman, which gives you the optimum pushing position to get you done and out of there in good time and without all the straining you might be used to.
Simply put your feet on the ottoman, and it realigns your system into more of a squatting position, to make a trip to the bathroom less ominous, painful, and frustrating.
You can get the Tushy ottoman in either all white for that clinical vibe, or white with bamboo legs to take the edge off.
Tushy Travel
Out and about, and need to go? Don’t leave your butt at the mercy of public bathroom toilet tissue, or any toilet tissue, come to that.
The Tushy Travel is exactly what it sounds like – a portable bidet attachment, so you can carry a supply of washing water and deliver yourself a strong stream through a 3-point spout.
No batteries required, no charging points – just squeeze and clean, wherever you are. For extra convenience, it comes with its own carrying case, and a carabiner for ease of carrying.
As with most Tushy products, you get a choice of color, though here, you’re not trying to match a bathroom chic, so you get simple options – black, white, or teal and you’re ready to go. When you… erm… go.
Bamboo Toilet Tissue
Looking for a reason to switch from your standard toilet tissue to the bamboo alternative?
Tell you what. Go back up this article a ways, and read that thing about the number of trees America sacrifices each year just to wipe its collective butt.
Done?
OK, let’s talk.
On the one hand of course, the point about going for Tushy products is to gradually eradicate the whole toilet tissue dependence we have. But even if you bidet, you’re still going to need a little tissue, otherwise you’re going to be walking around in soggy underwear all night.
The difference is that if you use a bidet attachment, you’re not wiping fecal matter all over your tender areas, you’re just dabbing dry. Which means using less toilet tissue in the first place. If you then switch to bamboo, you’re going the extra mile for the environment.
Here’s why. Firstly, bamboo grows fast. Much, much faster than trees. So it can be harvested and used without any similar impact on the environment.
Apart from which, bamboo doesn’t lock in anywhere near as much carbon, so when you harvest it, you barely ripple the overall climatological carbon dioxide levels.
In addition, bamboo can be grown without pesticides or fertilizer. Bamboo toilet tissue is made with no BPAs (bleaches, dyes or chemicals), and unlike some paper fibers, bamboo fibers are soft, more like flannel than paper (while still being eminently flushable).
It’s a sustainable crop, and – just to go fully green – it’s sold without any additional plastic wrap. So, yay for the planet, yay for your bidet-butt.
Tushy sells its toilet tissue in 3-ply (that’s 3 layers of fibers per roll, so it won’t dissolve on you mid-usage!). You can buy it by the 8-roll pack, or go for a 48-roll multipack.
If you decide to fully embrace the bamboo life, you can even get a regular subscription with Tushy, something akin to an Amazon Pantry subscription – so you’ll get more paper at the frequency you need.
Bamboo Towels
Yep – they’re exactly what you think they are. Towels. For your butt. Again, there’s a certain amount of de-grossing to be done here, but that’s mostly because we’ve imported some attitudes from the Victorian era and have yet to let them go.
Butt towels aren’t an alternative to toilet tissue if you’re just using toilet tissue – nobody’s suggesting you revert to Seventies style terry cloth diaper tactics and wipe your butt on towelling.
But if you’re fully down with the bidet lifestyle and want to cut out the dependence on toilet tissue altogether, these butt-towels will help you dry off after a thorough bidet-jet, and can be washed along with other towels in your natural laundry cycle.
Available in packs of 5, they’re made of 100% soft bamboo fiber.
Bamboo Bath Towels
While we’re loving on bamboo and its softness, you can also go the whole hog and get yourself some matching anti-bacterial, anti-microbial 100% bamboo bath towels.
Any reason why you should, especially? Bamboo softness, and the eco-qualifications are as good a reason as any to switch to a more bambootastic lifestyle. We’re not going to lie to you – they’re expensive for towels. But again, feel the softness and treat yourself.
Merch
If you want to be the total Tushy brand amb-assador, you can wear your allegiance to bidet attachments and bamboo in a lot of different ways.
Available exclusively from the Tushy website, rather than Amazon, you can get T-shirts that invite people to “Ask me about my butthole,” as well as pin badges, books, and console stickers.
It’s fair to say you probably need to be pretty secure in both the environment you’re in, as well as your ability to steer the ensuing conversations to the joy of bidets, to wear the merch, but hey, you do you – you never know who you might meet along the way.
More seriously on the merch page of the Tushy website, you can get replacement knobs for your bidet attachment as and when your old ones wear out.
To Tushy Or Not To Tushy
Here’s our verdict on the whole Tushy range.
On the one hand, Tushy is trying to be the model corporate citizen. It has identified an issue which is costing us the planet, sometimes causing us pain and distress, leaving us less hygienically clean than we’d like to think, and costing us money and resources we’d like to save.
The whole business of wiping our butts with dry toilet tissue is a hangover from our Victorian forebears.
It’s less hygienic than we’d like to think, can lead to butt health issues, and requires a lot of often non-replaceable trees to be cut down every year, on a long growing cycle. That releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and reduces our ability to pull it out again, all for the sake of wiping our butts.
The rest of the world is going increasingly bidet-crazy – in Japan, over 70% of people use bidets every day.
It’s in our interests, both personally and as stewards of the planet, to follow suit and get comfortable with washing our butts after every bathroom visit, rather than merely smearing ourselves semi-clean with dry toilet tissue.
That being so, and knowing that not everyone has either the space or the budget to plumb in a separate bidet bowl, Tushy gives most toilet-owners an easily-fittable solution that doesn’t take much in terms of plumbing knowledge to attach.
For the brave, intrepid souls, it’s cheaper to go with a Tushy Classic, which will give you a cold water butt-wash every time, summer or winter.
For those who want to help the planet but are less inclined to the cold wash, the Tushy Spa gives you the option of temperature controlled butt-washing.
The Tushy Ottoman addresses the issue with our classic bowl-position, and hikes our legs in a more squat-like position for better digestive transit and less straining.
And the Tushy Bamboo toilet tissue, “bum towels” and bath towels all help to reduce our dependency on single-use toilet tissue from long-life-cycle trees.
All the while, the company donates a percentage of its profits to Indian toilet projects to make the world a better place for people without access to clean, hygienic toilet facilities.
What’s Not To Love?
In and of itself, not much – Tushy makes a handful of compelling arguments to switch from dry toilet tissue to a simple bidet attachment and bamboo butt-drying equipment, rather than cutting down long-life-cycle trees to deliver single-use scratchy toilet tissue.
There’s a sense of supporting an ethical company, given by both the central mission of the brand and its donations to overseas projects.
That said, there are issues. Not all of the Tushy range is always available – even some of the products we’ve listed here will have shortages and waiting lists to overcome before you can get hold of them.
The bamboo toilet tissue subscription may not be available when you go to check it out, and similar issues of inconsistent availability have been noted across the product range.
There’s also the unfortunate fact that the price of most Tushy products is pretty high.
Certainly, a bidet attachment is always going to be cheaper than getting a whole separate bidet bowl, having it plumbed in and so on, but still, even within the bidet attachment market, Tushy is by no means the cheapest available option.
There’s an argument that Tushy is expensive more or less for the hair-shirt pleasure of suffering for one’s principles – that the price includes a kind of factored-in apology to the planet for all the single-use toilet tissue we’ve used in our lives, and for the fact that we have the privilege of bathrooms when many in poorer regions don’t.
As such, it’s possible to argue that Tushy products are aimed at those with more money in our society, who can expunge some self-imposed guilt for the state of the world by engaging in ethical capitalism.
That leaves lots of people with little option but to continue to go the dry toilet tissue route, or find a bidet attachment from a company with less of a corporate conscience, but which still helps deliver a clean butt without so much tissue.
But while there may be some truth in this, the existence of Tushy for those who can afford to choose it can’t really be equated to a bad thing – if people are switching to bidet attachments and bamboo butt-drying equipment, plus a percentage of the profits from that choice is helping provide toilet dignity in other parts of the world, there’s really no bad to find.
If you feel like making the switch to a bidet attachment and bamboo butt-dryers, there’s little to discourage you in the Tushy range, except for the potential cost over time, and some delivery inconsistencies.
As a premium range in its marketplace, if you need to justify the expense to yourself, you can think of it as:
- being kind to your butt
- being kind to your partners, friends, neighbors, and colleagues, because who’s gonna complain about your butt being cleaner than ever before?
- being kind to the planet, by ditching the traditional tree-based toilet tissue and switching to bamboo, and
- helping to support toilet projects in poorer regions with every Tushy purchase you make.
What kind of ass doesn’t want to do all that if they can? The ‘if they can’ is important, always, but if you can – why would you not?
What Other Customers Are Saying About Tushy
We can – and have – told you all about why Tushy products are the way forward for your bathroom routine. But hey, don’t take our word for it. Check out what some Amazon customers have said about them.
Life Changing
As a resident of the U S of A, bidets are a foreign concept to most. I installed it in literally 10 minutes. Ever since the install I have stopped drinking coffee in the morning, I wake up sit on the Tushy and fire away – what a way to start the day.
As for doing number 2, I laugh at all you TP users, the Tushy is amazing and I can’t poop anywhere that doesn’t have one.
I have been a squatty potty user for many years and now coupled with a Tushy, my bathroom experience is off the charts. So for any of you skeptics out there, buy this and thank me later.
WOW!
OMG. We’ve been living like animals. This thing is amazing.
NO More Toilet Paper!!!
- Installed in under 30 minutes – easy to use.
- No more smears or sticky buns. Always CLEAN.
- Have hemorrhoid issues, and after a week of using – the roids have noticeably lessened.
- Water control adjusts from a soft spray to a power spray.
Love it.
Love this Tushy. Well worth the price and easy to install. People laugh when you tell them you have one, that’s until they use it, then they are hooked.
Naturally, thee are some users who have occasional issues – but those mostly seem to be with the install:
Great product. Easy install – if you ignore instructions.
- Product, 5 stars
- Fun of having a butt-wash, 5 stars.
- Ease of installation, 5 stars
- Quality of instructions, 1 star.
I foolishly paid close attention to the instructions and spent a really long time trying to loosen the big nut but was turning it the wrong way. It looked wrong, it felt wrong, but the instructions were SO CLEAR and it was my first attempt at committing plumbing, so I went ahead and did what they said.
10 min stretched to I.5 hours as I needlessly disassembled my toilet’s interior so its parts wouldn’t break off as I tried hard to twist the stupid nut the way they said to.
If I’d turned the other way, it would have been a 5 minute job, it was that easy. No tools needed for the plumbing part. If you need to use vice grips, you are doing it wrong.
Probably.
Assembly was simple. Used the enclosed silicon tape, I had no leaks on the first try. Left it overnight with a dark pillow case under it to show if any leaks.
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