Review: Laurastar Iggi

I have to admit something: I am a serial clothes re-wearer. Nothing too crazy, mind you. This pertains almost exclusively to my dress shirts; if they're not stinky or wrinkly, I might try to get an extra day or three out of them. I do love a nice crisp shirt, though, so when I heard about a portable steamer from the manufacturer of my favorite fancy iron, I was intrigued.

Actually, it gave me a lot of feelings, all at once. The Iggi by Laurastar is a surprisingly good-looking handheld appliance with a nail-polish red (or white) base. The one I called in to review is pleasingly sturdy, unlike much of its cheap plastic competition; Laurastar commits to 10 years of repairs under its generous warranty. Even the cord is pleasingly natty, with a woven fabric cover. It's about as close to an objet d'art as you can get in the fabric-straightening world.

Also unique in this realm is that it's pressurized. While many cheaper models are like little electric kettles that sorta exhale the steam in the general direction of your clothes, this one is quite different. Fill it up, plug it in, squeeze the trigger, and steam shoots a couple feet straight out. Then again, you pay for all this. The Iggi costs $300, whereas you can pick up an excellent floor-standing (non-travel) clothes steamer for less than that amount or buy a well-rated handheld steamer for as little as $20.

Still, when someone tosses you the keys to a sports car, you don’t stand around yapping about the finer points of carburetors. You hop in and punch it. I grabbed a shirt, built up a literal head of steam in the Iggi, squeezed the trigger, and FWOOOOOSHHH! It's pretty fun! You hang the garment in front of you, then gently pull the bottom of it with one hand while using the other to zap the wrinkles by slowly waving the device back and forth like a paint sprayer.

I quickly got the feeling that it worked better on some fabrics than on others. So I called an expert to understand why and how she uses steam.

“I steam everything. It's convenient. It makes you look like you care,” says clothing designer Shari Noble. She runs Seattle's La Macón label and helped me with that incredible iron a few years ago. “It might not be the same effect as when you're ironing, but it's close.”

Noble says she likes the steaming effect so much she'll even hit the inside of lined leather jackets, but she doesn't steam exclusively. She prefers to iron linen and finds that cotton comes out crisper that way, but she loves the steamer for silk, velvet, and wool. If it's a really delicate item, she'll steam from the inside, which she finds keeps the presentation side of the fabric in perfect shape.

"Just don't shoot yourself in the face," she counseled.

Duly warned, I got rolling. At the suggestion of WIRED colleague Medea Giordano, I picked up an inexpensive favorite steamer made by URPower, a company that also makes elevated dog bowls, car seat covers, and essential oil diffusers. It costs $20, or 15 times less than the Iggi, and is one of those “tiny electric kettle” style steamers.

Photograph: Laurastar

I concentrated on my shirts, as they are made from a variety of fabrics in different thicknesses, and that's what I iron the most. I steamed one side of each with the Iggi and the other with the URPower. Quickly, I confirmed that cotton dress shirts are not the forte of steamers. They work for some gentle de-wrinkling of one that's been recently pressed, but not much more than that. An iron would do this work more quickly. I also noticed that, at least on this shirt, there was little difference in performance between the two steamers.

In a true pandemic flashback, I stayed in on a Friday night to do some head-to-head de-wrinkling, moving on to a linen shirt that had been ironed some time ago. This was clearly more steamer-friendly territory, the hot vapor gently smoothing out most of its creases. I could see the appeal of not hauling out the ironing board, especially if I only needed to spruce up that day's shirt, and I imagined my new routine: Wake up, plug in the steamer, make coffee, steam, head out the door.

I moved on to a 65 percent polyester, 35 percent cotton Western shirt, and that steamed pretty well too. But honestly, if you have a decent ironing setup, the added convenience of a handheld steamer isn't always that great. Speaking of setups, if you're committing to Team Steam, you'll want to figure out a way to hang your clothes so you can comfortably and effectively work on them, which means having them hanging from a solid hanger on a hook that won't budge. For me, that hook would be head-high, and that hanger would have no flex at all, allowing me to easily put gentle tension on the bottom of the fabric. One of those hangers that clamps onto pants would be helpful too.

Perhaps the best moment in the head-to-head competition was using the steamers on my Woolly-brand merino polos and T-shirts, which I found brand-new at a Goodwill shop in Seattle. (Side note: I highly recommend these shirts. Not itchy, and I don't—pardon my French—pit out nearly as much as I do in cotton tees, meaning I can wear them several days without washing.) One downside is that their label says “no iron,” but you can steam them! The steamers did a nice job of smartening them up, especially the polos. There's a lot of talk about how steaming restores a sheen or “breathes new life” into fabric, and this was as close as I got to that.

People apparently like steaming their curtains, so I tried that too. “Like” was a strong word in my case, and after doing side-by-side test zones of maybe 30 square feet with each steamer, I quit. I have no idea what my curtains are made of—some kind of refined jute?—but my wife, Elisabeth, and I inspected them with a couple different light angles and saw no difference at all.

Next, I took the Iggi to Mexico. The URPower steamer says right on it that it's “not for abroad,” which is a little counterintuitive for a travel steamer, but I was in no mood to start an electrical fire in a foreign country, so I left it at home. The Iggi is on the heavier side—at more than 2 pounds, its almost twice the weight of the URPower—but if you can afford a $300 steamer, you're probably not too worried about overweight-baggage fees.

Photograph: Laurastar

For the most part, the Iggi hit the road like a seasoned traveler, and I did a new round of testing, this time attacking my transit-scrunched duds. It did a nice job on that same linen shirt and wool polo, though I didn't notice much difference on a mid-weight synthetic (polyester?) guayabera, but that shirt doesn't wrinkle much anyway. The only surprise was Elisabeth's pajama top, which I wanted to try steaming, as it's a mid-weight silk, but the effect was surprisingly limited. Finally, I pulled out a new polo of mine that's a 50-50 blend of cotton and acrylic, but after steaming four other pieces of clothing, pausing only to refill the water tank, the Iggi understandably overheated and I called it a day.

If I were to sum up my time with the Iggi in slightly esoteric terms, it would go something like this: After a non-exclusive period in our relationship, we took a trip together to a foreign land where we had a nice time together. We then returned home and mutually agreed on a very amicable parting of the ways.

During that time I learned a few things about myself, most notably that I'm more of an ironer than a steamer. If I had a larger collection of delicate fabrics in my wardrobe, it may have made more sense for me. The bigger problem was the lack of major difference in the head-to-head testing—there just wasn't much in the fabrics I tested. I could easily keep up my shirt re-wearing habit with the URPower, which performed nearly as well at a fraction of the price. And that reminded me of something Medea Giordano had said in our email exchange:

“If I had to choose between being wrinkly and spending $300,” she wrote, “I'm going to be wrinkly.”