Never met a Chamois I liked

… Until now!

The SMS Santini MIG3 chamois was immediate love at first sight, and first sit. Frustrated with my dying gear that never excited me in the first place, I went to my bike shop and ordered a second set of their kit shorts. I figured shopping and researching didn’t make my butt happy, maybe there wasn’t a such thing as a happy female taint on a bike saddle.

Love love LOVE! This chamois!

First of all, it’s black and green and orange. As a girl, let me tell you, it sucks having white products that touch your leaky bits because try as you might to keep the colorful fluids safely contained, vaginas leak and body fluids stain fabrics. So the nice dark chamois made me instantly happy to know that I won’t have to worry about staining my race kit.

Second, it’s got some serious padding! This is a gel chamois and I didn’t know it when I bought it, but gel in the chamois is an awesome idea. It’s got two big ole gel pads right under the sit bones, and two more running parallel down the length of the saddle. Moreover, it’s got a built in relief zone that, when combined with the meager relief zones in my Fi’zi:k saddle, make a channel that’s actually almost deep enough to take my body weight off my precious genitals. The fact that it’s articulated gel pads instead of multi density foam gives me confidence that over time, both on long rides but also in the long run of thousands of kilometers of use, my body weight is not going to crush this chamois into another blood sucking mush taking up precious space where my arteries ought to be flowing.

Looking it up on Santini’s official website gave me a small shock of disappointment. It’s a “unisex” chamois which in all practical terms means it’s a men’s chamois because the majority of non women specific testing is done on a primarily male sample set. That said, the twenty kilometers of tits out screaming hard distance (I was having a good day) that I put into this chamois has me nothing short of incredibly pleased. A saddle that I have come to think of as a torture device was actually pretty nice to sit on with this chamois. I can’t wait to try it out on my Selle Italia Lady Flow on a serious morning training ride. Will update you with more information then!