Review: Tushy Aura Electric Bidet

Tushy has done a lot to raise awareness about bidets in the United States. I don't personally love their approach to marketing—potty puns aplenty and a T-shirt that reads “Ask Me About My Butthole”—but as the keeper of our guide to the best bidets, and as a long-time advocate for bidets, I have to respect the hustle.

I also haven't been especially impressed by Tushy's products. The company's flagship is a simple, cheap bidet that attaches under a standard toilet seat to clean using cold water. You can adjust the angle of the spray with a small switch and adjust the power of the spray with a knob. They run about $100, and there's no power required, meaning they're a nice entry point to the world of bidet attachments for an American audience still mostly unfamiliar with the devices. However, they're no replacement for a modern bidet seat with heated water, night lights, UV sanitization, and fully adjustable spray settings.

Photograph: Tushy

The new Aura is Tushy's attempt to set up to the likes of Toto and Kohler with a full-function powered bidet attachment. At $600, it's priced like its competition. After a week of testing, I can say it does a good job of keeping pace.

Plumber’s Track

For anyone still unfamiliar with how bidet seat attachments work, it's worth a quick explanation. Every bidet attachment I've tested—more than a dozen now—works by adding a splitter to the hose that connects the water spigot on the wall of your bathroom which runs to the bottom of the toilet tank.

To install you turn the spigot off, flush the toilet to empty the tank, screw on the splitter, and then connect one side of the splitter to the toilet tank and the other to the bidet attachment. Instead of the water only refilling the toilet tank, some will flow into the seat, where it's used to spray your bottom off after you use the restroom. These devices only take about 20 minutes to install if everything goes smoothly (if your toilet tank is less than 6 inches from the wall, I highly recommend this $20 attachment to ease installation), and the bidet helps you feel fresh after every trip to the restroom.

Photograph: Tushy

In the case of the classic Tushy bidet attachment, the water is controlled by a knob and comes out of the sprayer at the same temperature it flows into the tank. With electric bidets that follow in the footsteps of those invented by Japanese toilet maker Toto's Washlet line, the water is heated and the spray can be adjusted with varying degrees of precision. The only downside is that you have to plug these attachments into a GFCI outlet, and most American bathrooms aren't built with an outlet on the floor behind the toilet.

Reading the Aura

After popularizing its basic bidets, Tushy has three new electric models ranging from $350 to $600. The cheaper models are the Cloud and Cloud+, which have heated water, a fan, a night-light, and other basic features common to electric bidets under $500. They were released on March 3. The Aura is the company's luxury model, released in February, and adds a lid that closes and opens automatically and a digital display that shows the water temperature. One of these features is an absolute necessity for me, the other I could live without.

Photograph: Tushy

If you've never used a toilet with a lid that opens and closes automatically, you might think it's an extravagance. After several years with home bidets that offer this function, I view it as an absolute requirement. That is, I now really hate touching toilet seats. The Aura's automatic open/close function is well-calibrated and works as well as any I've seen, never getting triggered by me walking through the hallway next to the bathroom but also never leaving me hanging. For whatever reason, it also doesn't get triggered when I step out of the shower, unlike most other models I've used. A button lifts the seat for men to pee, and it works well.

The digital display shows on the back of the seat, above the hinge that controls the seat and cover, and displays the water temperature of the seat. I don't especially like this, as I prefer bidets to blend into the bathroom as subtly as possible.

Another nice feature of the Aura is the instant heater, which means you never run out of warm water—this feature is a relatively recent addition to bidets, and I'm happy to see it becoming the standard.

The two things I found lacking on the Aura compared to competitors (which, to be fair, are mostly a little more expensive) were the fan and the water controls.

Photograph: Martin Cizmar

Drying fans are often the first place I notice the difference between premium bidets that cost north of grand and cheaper models. The Aura's fan is very loud (I measured it above 60 decibels on high) and yet not very powerful, taking a minute or more to dry me off.

The Aura's remote is intuitive by way of its simplicity—unlike with Toto's higher-end models, there's no way to adjust the spray's width or angle, and there are no presets for different users—but it does have the most important spray adjustments, like back, forward, and flow strength. The fan speed can also be adjusted with three clicks of one button rather than having to click the fan button and then separately adjust its speed up or down, as with the Toto.

Touché Tushy

The Aura is a solid product, and I'd recommend it as a budget pick (especially if it goes on sale as often as the classic Tushys do) or an upgrade for any brand partisan looking to get into an electric bidet. For now, I take it as a welcome sign the American bidet market is maturing from the era of the “Clean Butt Society” T-shirt toward a bright new future of heated seats, night-lights, and auto-opening toilet seats.