Review: MiHigh Infrared Sauna Blanket

I used to love the sauna. My roommates and I would sneak into our housing complex’s communal steam room late at night, blast music from a crappy JBL speaker, and get really high. As we sweated out our woes, we’d pass around the aux cord to take turns picking songs, and occasionally break our stupefied silence to talk about the nature of consciousness or, like, how dope DJ Shadow was or something. I have never felt more at peace.

Smash cut to whatever the hell is going on these days, when I’m eager to ameliorate the crushing, hopeless dread of pandemic stress and once again experience that sense of calm. So when a PR rep for the Australian company MiHigh reached out about something called a sauna blanket, I said I was interested. After all, saunas are said to reduce stress, boost cardiovascular health, and potentially reduce blood pressure. My acute aversion to Covid-19 has kept me from clamoring into any unfamiliar saunas. My apartment is too dinky to allow space for even a pop-up steam nook. Something with a smaller footprint sounded just right.

MiHigh’s sauna blanket is exactly what it sounds like: a blanket that is also a sauna. Imagine slipping into a giant Hot Pocket. You wrap it around your body, smoosh shut the velcro flaps, and lie cocooned in the warm embrace of a sweltering sleeping bag. Afterward, it folds up like a blanket for easy stashing. It’s designed to be used on any flat surface that can handle the heat, but it's most comfortable splayed across a bed. The interior is a polyurethane material with a waterproof liner that prevents your sweat from soaking your surroundings. When I first unzipped the bag, I noticed the inside felt and smelled like a brand new inflatable pool.

When MiHigh launched last year, it was able to ride the wave of demand for at-home wellness equipment propelled by the pandemic. Sauna blankets have been lauded by Goop and used by everyone from TikTok influencers to rugby players. MiHigh's blanket is not the only product in its particular niche, but it is perhaps the most refined.

Photograph: Mihigh

The blanket is electric, so it has a power cord that plugs into a regular wall socket. You operate it by booping the buttons on a roundish control box that’s attached in-line to the cord. The box is roughly two smartphones wide and three deep. It feels a bit thick when you’re fiddling with it, but it’s nothing compared to the great big blocks that house the controls on some comparable products. In fact, the whole MiHigh unit is quite compact. Folded up, you could stuff it into a carry-on suitcase if you shoved it in there just right. It weighs 17.6 pounds.

Testing a zip-up portable sauna raises some operational concerns. I mean, people tend to go nude in saunas, don’t they? Am I supposed to wear a towel around my waist? Do I just climb in there buck naked? Are the heating elements going to bake my beans?

Fortunately, MiHigh answers most of those questions. Immediately upon opening the box, I found a prominently placed notecard with functional tips and a warning that stated, “Do not use the blanket without wearing clothing.” It recommends “long-sleeved exercise gear and socks.” Following this instruction meant that I actually wound up putting on extra clothing to climb into the sauna.

Inside, the blanket warms your body with infrared light. Infrared saunas have been around for decades, though they became a full-blown wellness phenomenon around 2016. The bright idea is that infrared light warms up your body from inside, as opposed to heating up the air around you. (Note that purists say the only real sauna is the kind with rocks atop a stove). Proponents of the infrared craze have marketed them with a variety of dubious claims about their health benefits. On MiHigh’s website, the company says that “infrared heat is 7X more detoxifying than regular heat.” It’s a claim that’s been wielded by other infrared sauna companies before, though the exact numbers tend to fluctuate. You can interpret that statement however you want, since it is completely unquantifiable. The notion of “detoxification” is at best an inexact science and at worst a total crock. The sauna blanket heats you up. It’s not magic.

The heat setting ranges from 95 to 165 degrees Fahrenheit. It took 15 to 20 minutes to really heat up, and then another 10 or 15 until I started sweating. MiHigh recommends spending 30 minutes to an hour in there.

I used the blanket a few times a week, sometimes after workouts and sometimes on its own. I felt the best using it a day after a particularly long run, when my legs were still sore from being overworked. After an hour under the sauna blanket, I felt like I could almost walk correctly again. Lying in the blanket can be a meditative experience, if you approach it with a zen mindset and good chill-out playlist. It can also feel restrictive, what with having your range of motion limited by the blanket’s bulky confines. It feels like putting on a weighted blanket, which can be either soothing or suffocating, depending on how you feel about being swaddled. That constriction feels even weirder once the wetness starts.

Photograph: Mihigh

There is no sauna without sweat. It’s the entire point. But in a normal sauna, your perspiration disperses into the surrounding atmosphere. In a sauna blanket, the atmosphere is you. The waterproof materials lock everything in by design, lest you wind up wetting the bed, so to speak. After an hour inside the sauna blanket, I was broiling in my own juices. To say I emerged damp is a wild understatement. I was utterly, completely soaked. My clothes clung to my sticky skin. When I staggered into the other room to report my experience to my partner, she reacted like someone just tried to drown me.

After I wrung out my underwear, I had to clean up the blanket itself. To do that, you open the velcro flaps and cast the blanket open. The sweat collects in little puddles that scamper across the hydrophobic interior when you try to wipe them up. Even once you’ve soaked up all you can, another problem persists: The fabric edges that run all the way around the blanket have a tendency to collect moisture as well. Since my head pokes out of the blanket, when I’m done, the outer area of the sauna blanket that stays in contact with my neck and shoulders feels like a rope that’s been dunked in the bathtub. It does dry eventually, but only after I let it sit out on the bed for an hour and wait for the dampness to turn cold and slowly evaporate.

Look, I get it. Your glands may vary. And complaining about sweat in a sauna is like being mad that the curry you ordered “Thai spicy” is too hot. I’m about to go to the comments section at the bottom of this review and type, “That’s the point, dumbass!” myself. But the whole time I was in there sweating, the warm plasticky sides were pressed against my body from all angles. I could not ignore my discomfort. If I needed to adjust my position, any movement felt tight yet slippery. I don't get claustrophobic easily, but steaming up into a slimy lather while being constricted by nearly 20 pounds of plastic, moist fabric, and electrical heating elements is not enjoyable. I had hoped that coming out of a session would feel more invigorating and less like emerging from the cave in The Descent.

While your curiosity about what it feels like to spend an hour lying inside an electrified zip-loc baggie will surely guide your purchasing decision, your wallet will be a determining factor here too. MiHigh’s sauna blanket costs $500, though it's frequently on sale for a little less. Still, that’s about the middle of the price range for these things, so I guess that means it's a fair value. I wouldn’t pay up, because for me, $500 would mean choosing between that and food. And the experience of using the MiHigh definitely didn’t make my city’s stay-at-home order feel any less soul-crushing.

For people with joint pains or blood pressure issues that a sauna can help alleviate, this might provide a way to relieve some of that discomfort without having to risk going to a public facility during a pandemic. But if you're looking to "detoxify" or just chill out for a bit, well, maybe go take a long bath instead. You’ll probably stay drier that way.