X

Mutant Octaloofah gives you shower music plus skin exfoliation

Exfoliate. Massage. Rock out. In the pantheon of tech gadgets you can use in the shower, the Octaloofah may very well rule them all out of sheer strangeness.

Amanda Kooser
Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto.
Amanda Kooser
2 min read

Octaloofah
Shower, scrub, massage and listen. Octaloofah

There are plenty of waterproof Bluetooth speaker options for people who want to groove to their tunes while scrubbing up. There's even a shower curtain with speakers and a built-in tablet holder. But none of these gadgets can compete against the oddity that is the Octaloofah on Kickstarter, a device that combines a massager, loofah and Bluetooth speaker into one weird package.

The device suctions onto your shower wall and sports four round loofah pads, a massage nodule and a waterproof speaker. The pads can be removed and replaced.

The idea is that you sidle up the Octaloofah and use it to scrub those hard-to-reach places on your back or work out a knot in your shoulder. The whole while, you can be singing along to songs like "Blame it on the Rain" by Milli Vanilli. You can also take phone calls through the speaker, but that's generally a bad idea for obvious reasons.

The Octaloofah has an uphill funding battle in front of it. It's shooting for an ambitious $65,000 Kickstarter funding goal and has less than $3,000 in pledges with 36 days left to go. Early-bird $39 (about £25, AU$47) pledges are still available, with the regular price coming in at $59 (about £38, AU$71).

The Octaloofah's success likely hinges on how many people out there think it's a good idea to combine loofahs, a speaker and a massage knob in one shower-ready device. Personally, I can't decide if it's clever or a form of gadget madness.

Octaloofah feels like the sort of product that would appear in the pages of SkyMall. It's a head-scratcher of a back-scratcher, but it has a certain goofy appeal to it. If you're planning to buy a Bluetooth shower speaker anyway, then you might consider the Octaloofah since it comes with the bonus scrubbers. It would probably feel pretty good to run a hot shower, exfoliate the middle of your back and sing along with "It's Raining Men" at the top of your lungs all at the same time.