I Tried Those Viral Lola Blankets (original) (raw)

By ,a writer at the Strategist covering Gen Z shopping habits and fashion. She joined the Strategist in 2024. Previously, she wrote about gifts at Shop Today.

Photo-Illustration: The Strategist; Photos: Bella Druckman

In my mind, there are two types of families: those who stockpile enough blankets to ward off hypothermia (even if their heat functions perfectly fine) and those who buy blankets — typically thin throws made of wool or cotton — merely to complete their picturesque sectional spread. Having grown up in the former, I still keep a healthy stack of four blankets on my couch (and three more in storage), all of which is to say I know my blankets. So, when I started spotting a distinctly fluffy, almost ruffled blanket pop up again (and again) on my social feeds early last year, I was intrigued. But the accompanying praise — from influencers touting it as “life-changing” to celebrities we’ve interviewed counting it as an item they can’t live without — was enough to make me wonder, really, What’s so special about a Lola blanket? To see how it stacks up against other blankets, I’ve been sleeping, snuggling, and even traveling with it over the past year.

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When Lola Blankets first sent me a blanket, I have to admit I was skeptical. During the first few months of testing, I was simply trying to figure out if the blanket was special enough to even warrant a review on our site. But after accepting that the blanket really is as soft as it looks, it started to win me over.Out of the box, it’s, for lack of a better word, silky. Stroking its fine, faux fur feels like how I imagine petting a chinchilla feels. And while the “hairs” of the fur are asfine as the wavy hair on my head, I’ve never noticed them shed onto my clothes. (In fact, when I tried pulling the fibers out of the blanket, I could only get out a couple of measly hairs.) All of this is achieved with the brand’s blend of polyester and spandex, which adds spandex to the pure polyester composition you’ll typically find in similar blankets from Anthropologie, Cozy Earth, and West Elm. The spandex creates the gelato-case-display-like folds the blanket has become known for and allows the blanket to stretch when it cocoons you, making it feel even more like a hug. The blanket’s double-sided softness gives it a nice heft akin to my weighted blanket, too.

The Lola blanket on the bottom left, compared to other _faux-_fur items.Photo: Bella Druckman

The texture paired with the blanket’s impressive ability to trap heat quickly made it the one I would reach for whenever I was watching TV, hunkering down to write an article, or looking for an extra bedding layer on particularly chilly nights. Still — because I don’t have an in-unit washer-dryer and I’ve seen _faux-_fur die in the wash — I babied it. I’d keep food at arm’s length and sip my coffee with care. But once I was assigned this story, I knew I would have to eventually give the Lola the wash test, so (to my family’s joy), I ordered a sample to my parents’ house in Chicago, where the blanket could get a proper jostling from the 12 people (and two dogs) we squeezed into our house for the holidays along with a proper wash-and-dry treatment.

From the moment the blanket arrived, it was clear that I wouldn’t be seeing it until I shoved it in my extra suitcase on the way home. My siblings kept taking it from each other’s rooms, and my sister was certainly being extra nice to me with the hopes that I would let her take it back to college. (I still don’t know how she was planning to fit the 80-by-90-inch blanket on her twin XL.) The blanket even impressed my mom, the person behind the stockpile of blankets we keep in our house,who told me, “All other blankets have been ruined for me.”

But after comfortably covering my three siblings and me on Christmas morning, enduring cuddles from my family’s two Bernedoodles, and a couple weeks of playing musical bedrooms, the blanket was due for a wash. So I double-checked the washing directions; threw it in our washing machine on cold, low spin, and low soil; and hoped for the best. Right out of the wash, I must say the blanket looked like, well, wet fur. Still, trusting the wash instructions, I hung the blanket on our drying rack and rotated it every half-hour for about four hours. After tumble-drying it with no heat in the dryer for about 20 minutes, the blanket looked as good as new (and smelled nice, too). My lint trap barely picked up any stray fibers as well. It turns out, all the horror videos I’d seen online about washing the Lola blanket were simply the result of user error. (Air-drying it may be tedious, but heat-drying it will ruin it.)

The extra-large blanket stretched across a majority of my sister’s room.Photo: Bella Druckman

Given the hype surrounding the blanket, I wanted to find a flaw in its design. After 12 months of testing the older blanket, I haven’t noticed any pilling or matting; it’s just as soft and smooth as it was on day one. If there’s one drawback to the texture, I’d say it’s almost too soft and slinky: My boyfriend compared it to the weak layer in a snowpack. “Things on top of it can slide off like an avalanche,” he noted. So, if you’re planning to sleep with it, I recommend putting it on top of your duvet, where I’ve noticed it is most likely to stay on until the morning.

The other thing I noticed was that after about a year of testing, there were some loose threads and a few small tufts of the fur coming loose. The blanket has noticeably clean stitching and a thick, short pile, so when something is loose, you really notice it. I would expect more durability in a blanket that starts at $275 for adult sizes. Considering that similar blankets — especially from Anthropologie and West Elm — can go for half that, the biggest disadvantage of the Lola blanket by comparison is that it’s priced in the aspirational-purchase category. (Although a quick search on social media pulls up tons of influencer videos with steep discount codes.)

The blanket has a thickly packed pile construction.Photo: Bella Druckman

While I won’t be swapping the Lola blanket for my top sheet anytime soon, the occasional stray thread doesn’t bother me when I’m sitting under it while relaxing on my couch. The blanket is leagues softer than the $40 Threshold one I also own and surpasses the fond memories I have of the Brookstone blankets I grew up napping under, too. And it just looks nice, whether it’s folded on my couch or draped across my bed. (Not to mention it also earned a spot in our Best in Class guide to throw blankets.) So long as you buy it on sale (which is almost always possible in my experience), I’d say it’s worth the splurge if you’ve been curious to try it for yourself, especially since it’s available in enough colors and patterns to mesh into just about any aesthetic. In these coming cold fronts, it’s the only blanket I’ll be huddling under when my heat simply isn’t cutting it.

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