The best shower curtain hooks and rings

Zenna lists 56 of these. There are three decisions in the whole catalog

Zenna Home publishes 56 shower hooks and rings. Read the names rather than the photographs and almost all of that variety turns out to be finishes: the same hook in chrome, bronze, nickel and matte black, four SKUs deep. Strip the colors out and the catalog answers only three questions.

1. Does it glide? Zenna’s names tell you directly — Metal Roller, Plastic Roller Glide, Oval Gliding, Double Glide Ball, V-Glide Hinged on one side; Plastic O-ring, Closed Shower Rings, Round Metal Shower Rings and C-shaped Shower Hooks on the other.
2. One curtain or two? Every line with Double in the name carries a curtain and a liner on the same ring. Every line without it carries one.
3. Steel or aluminum? This is the one Zenna answers with a single word, and it is worth a section of its own below.

Nothing else in the catalog is a specification. There is no diameter, no weight, no material grade and no warranty on any of the 56.

Decision one: the roller is not a luxury

Moen is the only maker here that says out loud what the roller is for, and it is worth quoting in full because it reframes the purchase: “smooth-rolling ball bearings eliminate snagging, tugging and pulling of the curtain and work on most shower curtain and rod types”.

A plain ring has to slide, metal on metal, along the rod. When it catches — and a wet curtain catches — you pull harder, and that pull arrives at the rod as a sideways load. If the rod is screwed to the wall, nothing happens. If it is a tension rod held up by spring pressure between two walls, that is the load that eventually walks the end caps off their grip.

So the hook you choose is partly a decision about the rod. Three of our four rod picks are tension rods, which makes the roller the default recommendation on this site rather than an upgrade. A few dollars of ball bearing protects a mounting method that has no fixings at all.

Decision two: one rod or two

The arrangement everybody wants is a decorative curtain hanging outside the tub and a waterproof liner tucked inside it, so the water stays in and the nice fabric stays dry. There are two ways to get it.

The first is a double rod, which we do not recommend on a tension fitting: twice the fabric hanging off a friction grip, which is why the double tension rod is the skip pick on the rods page. The second is a double hook — one ring on the rod, two hooks hanging off it, one for each layer. Zenna sells four variations of it (Double Shower Hooks, Rustproof Aluminum Double Shower Hooks, Double Roller Shower Hooks and Rustproof Aluminum Double Roller Shower Hooks), and it costs about fifteen dollars instead of about twenty for a second rod.

If you are hanging one layer only, a double hook is wasted. Decide this before you decide anything else, because it halves the list. Whether you need a liner at all is covered here.

Decision three: “Rustproof” is a material claim, “rust resistant” is not

Zenna’s catalog is unusually disciplined about this, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. The word Rustproof appears on the aluminum lines and nowhere else. The steel hooks are sold as rust resistant on the retail listings, which describes a plating rather than the metal under it.

That difference only matters in a room that stays wet. A bathroom with a window that opens and a fan that runs will not kill a plated steel hook. A windowless internal bathroom with a fan nobody switches on is a different environment, and it is the environment where the five-dollar saving turns into spotted hooks inside a year. The same logic runs through every piece of hardware in a wet room.

Open, closed or hinged

One more distinction, and it is the reason the cheapest hooks in any shop are the cheapest. Zenna sells C-shaped Shower Hooks and Deluxe Plastic C-Shaped Shower Hooks alongside its Closed Shower Rings and V-Glide Hinged Shower Hooks.

A C-shape is an open hook: it drops over the rod and nothing holds it there. It is the fastest to fit, because you do not have to take the rod down or thread anything, and it is the one that lifts off when somebody yanks the curtain sideways. A closed ring or a hinged hook has to be opened and clipped around the rod, which is a minute of extra work once and then never again.

Buy closed or hinged unless the reason you are shopping is that you cannot take the rod down.

The five, side by side

Every cell is either a figure the maker publishes or an admission that it does not. Four of the five rows have more of the second kind than the first, which is the honest state of this category.

The number nobody publishes

We went looking for an inner diameter on all 56 of Zenna’s hooks and rings and on Moen’s product page, and found exactly one size figure in the entire category: a 2 in. diameter, printed on the retail listing for the plain metal rings rather than in either maker’s catalog.

Moen’s answer is a sentence instead of a number — “fits most shower curtains and rod types” — which is honest about the situation and useless for checking. If you have a standard 1 in. tension rod, anything on this page will fit it. If you have a chunky decorative rod, you are buying on faith, and the plain rings are the only pick where faith is not required.

Nobody publishes a weight either, which is the same absence we hit on the rods: no maker in this corner of the bathroom rates any of it for load. Keep the curtain light and the question does not arise. What each curtain material weighs when it is wet is here.

If you rent

Every pick on this page rates Safe on our install rating, and this is the easiest Safe on the whole site: a curtain hook touches the rod and the curtain and nothing else. No drilling, no adhesive, no suction, nothing to patch, nothing to explain at a move-out inspection. How the rating works is here.

It is also the cheapest improvement in this part of the bathroom by a wide margin. A set of roller hooks costs less than a curtain and changes how the curtain feels every single day, which is a better return than most of what gets called an upgrade. The rest of the no-tools list is here.

What we have not done

We have not hung any of these hooks, pulled a curtain until a ring failed, or measured a rod. Every figure above is published by Zenna or Moen and cited at the foot of the page, and where nothing is published — inner diameter on all five, weight on all five, material on four of them — this page says so rather than estimating. The reasoning about tugging, leverage and tension rods follows from Moen’s own published description of what its ball bearings are for, and it is labeled as reasoning rather than as a test result. Prices are read live and shown with the date they were checked.