7 Best Shower Water Filters, WIRED Tested and Reviewed
If you spend enough time on Instagram, you might begin to get the idea that the biggest problem facing America is water. And that the best shower water filters are the only answer. Over the past few years, a new generation of stylish filtered showerheads has arrived to hijack our collective social media feed—and possibly our subconscious—with a terrifying question.
Can you really trust the water that comes out of your shower?
The answer, according to WIRED’s reporting, is not always encouraging. The makers of filtered showerheads often make bold pronouncements about what your deteriorating pipes and chemical-filled shower water might be doing to your body, during what may otherwise be the only peaceful five minutes of your day. If you can rid yourself of the chlorine or contaminants in your water, the argument goes, it may be the cure for your most embarrassing problems: everything from frizzy hair to limp hair to dandruff, hair loss, eczema, dry skin, split ends, blackheads, and the heartbreak of psoriasis.
The best shower water filters on this list are indeed quite good at removing the abrasive chlorine compounds that cities add to your tap water to kill bacteria. And so this was our focus. Maybe half the country’s water systems, including New York and Seattle, use chlorine to disinfect the city’s water supply. But most major metropolitan areas use a more stable substance called chloramine that’s thought to be less carcinogenic. Chloramine is more difficult to filter out—and not all shower filters succeed.
In fact, the differences in performance were shockingly big in some cases. So, let’s say you don’t like chlorine in your water? And you live in a city? These are the showerheads we recommend.
For more purity filters and tests, check out our guides to the Best Backpacking Water Filters, Best Air Purifiers, and Best Indoor Air Quality Monitors. For more ways to level up your bathroom, check out our guides to the Best Bidets, Best Electric Toothbrushes, and the Best Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products for Your Home.
Updated April 2025: We’ve added the Weddell Duo, Hydroviv, and Curo filters and showerheads, and updated our descriptions of previous picks after durability testing. We also updated prices and links throughout.
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How We Tested and What We Tested
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The market for filtered showerheads remains young and largely unregulated, and performance claims are only rarely backed up publicly by independent data. We made lots of requests, but few shower filter companies hand over their lab results. (Thank you, Aquasana, Weddell, and Curo for being exceptions.)
Some makers told us that independent labs and certifying bodies have been backed up, and that data is forthcoming. Many offered customer satisfaction surveys instead. This all means that some skepticism is warranted.
And so I got out test kits at home, instead. First I tested the total chlorine levels in the water without any filtering, a measure that includes either chloramine or free chlorine that’s interacted with whatever’s in your pipes. Then I tested the water filtered by the showerhead. I performed each test multiple times to account for imprecision or fluctuations in testing and in municipal chlorine levels. In most cases, I did this over multiple days.
For testing, I avoided painfully unreliable home test strips, and instead got out somewhat nasty chemical indicators and used digital and chemical tests designed for pools and aquariums.
We also tested total dissolved solids using a TDS meter, and separately tested filters’ effects on pH in order to gauge effects but also to verify the reliability of chemical test results.
The effectiveness of filters goes down over time, of course, depending on how much contamination is filtered out of the water—which is why filters always need to be changed. As we update this guide, we’ll continue to test the most effective showerhead filters to see how their efficacy changes over time—and add any new shower filters we’re able to recommend.
What Shower Filters Probably Don’t Do
The upshot is that you probably shouldn’t expect these shower filters to soften the mineral hardness of your water or remove most substances.
After all, a filter must be relatively small to fit into a showerhead. And yet it’s being asked to filter gallons of water each minute, pushed out at both high temperature and high pressure. A showerhead filter poses a daunting engineering challenge, as compared to countertop water filters that treat only a small amount of water at a time—or a bulky reverse-osmosis device that can plug into your under-sink plumbing.
So what do these showerhead filters actually do, in a way we can measure? They filter chlorine and chlorine compounds, mostly through chemical reactions. Pretty much every American city adds low concentrations of chlorine or chlorine compounds to drinking water to kill potentially harmful bacteria. This is all well and good when the water’s still in the pipes. But chlorine’s not exactly great for your hair or your skin, and few people like to drink it. Some are also especially sensitive to the taste or smell, or prone to skin reactions.
The most prominent home shower filters rely in part on a zinc-copper mixture called KDF-55, known to be quite effective at neutralizing “free” chlorine in chlorine-treated systems. Other common substances used to treat chlorine and chlorine compounds include calcium sulfite and activated or catalytic carbon. The most effective filters use these in some combination. The main thing I was able to verify, and test, was shower filters’ ability to remove the total chlorine content of water coming out of your shower.
We’ve seen little evidence that the most common types of showerhead filters have much effect on the softness or hardness of water, or on calcium buildup. In fact, some early academic studies present evidence that they don’t. The shower filters we tested also had very little effect on the sum total of dissolved solids in our water, according to measurements with a TDS meter—i.e., the filters aren’t removing a large amount of materials or minerals from the water.
I wasn’t able to test claims by some companies that these filters remove heavy metals like lead and arsenic, which thankfully aren’t in my pipes. We only found one company, Weddell, whose filter was certified to remove lead. So far, so good! Nonetheless, if you believe you have dangerous lead or arsenic in your water, you probably shouldn’t try to fix the problem with a mail-order showerhead. Talk to a water treatment professional or your public health authority.
If you live in a major US city, chlorine is likely not what your city uses to treat the water in its pipes. New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Phoenix use chlorine, sure. But Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, and most big cities in Texas don’t.
More than half of American big cities use a substance called chloramine, a more stable and enduring chemical that’s harder to filter and test. That’s also what was in my water supply. To test, I got out my handy digital water colorimeter and a somewhat nasty chemical indicator, and then tested the ability of each shower filter to treat any of a number of chlorine compounds in the water.
First I tested the total chlorine in the water without any filtering, then I tested the water filtered by the showerhead. I did each test multiple times to account for imprecision or fluctuations in testing and in municipal chlorine levels. In most cases, I did this over multiple days. As we update this guide, we’ll continue to test the most effective showerhead filters to see how their efficacy changes over time—and add any new shower filters we’re able to recommend.