A wet T-shirt in the cold is so nasty. Moisture managed fabrics like Buff® keep you comfortable (123rf.com / buff.eu)
Cotton is horrible when wet. It gets heavy, feels wet and clings. Add cold weather and your wellbeing goes south.
Buff® fabrics manage moisture. So good that wearing a wet Buff® as beanie in the cold feels okay.
4 other ways it does a great job
Cycling
Sweating and wind don’t go well together. The chill on those wet spots destroys your fun.
MM gets rid of these wet spots. Feel dry and enjoy your ride.
Running in the heat
You’re sweating. Actually you’re sweating a lot. MM takes the sweat away from you skin to the outside. Now cooling can do it’s job for your well-being.
Climbing
Sweat in you eyes and no chance of wiping it away. To make things worse you are in a critical part of the route.
MM keeps the sweat out of your eyes. It takes the sweat from your forehead and distributes it all over the fabric. Now cooling can get rid of it.
Diving
Long hair floating in your face? Tame it by using a Buff® fabric as hair cover.
MM makes a Buff® feel okay even when totally wet.
What exactly is Moisture Management?
It’s the ability of a fabric to draw moisture away from the skin and distribute it evenly. The emphasis is on evenly. The more even it is the less the skin feels it.
Here is a demo of a Buff® fabric vs. some other (cheap) tube fabric.
Limitations
Wearing the outside of the fabric on your skin reduces the function. Make sure you always have the inside of the fabric on your skin.
If you are a heavy sweater you might get to the limits. The High UV Buff® fabric has the highest MM properties in the world. Should that fail you’ve tried all that’s available.
How to easily check other fabrics for MM
Test it
Easiest is to take a eyedropper with water and put one drop on the fabric. Just see how the fabric suck up the drop and how it is spread across the fabric. Compare it to your Buff® and you get a good feeling what that fabric will do on your skin.
Have a close look
A cotton T-shirt is one of the worst fabrics for MM. That’s why they feel so bad when wet.
As a rule of thumb if the yarn looks thick and the weave is wide you can expect bad MM. The closer it looks like a T-shirt fabric the more likely it is to have bad MM.