I avoided white tape for that reason for many years, but my personal bike esthetics coach (you all may recognize him as [MENTION=401497]RiddleOfSteel[/MENTION]) kept pushing me to try white tape (white cable housing already there on this bike). I finally accepted his advice with some Fiz’ik ‘Classic Touch’. It hasn’t felt slippery when wet and not all Fiz’ik tapes have this same smoothish surface. Wasn’t sure about unpadded tape, but find that I don’t even notice it anymore. Here it is today after 10 months/2000 miles of use, no special cleaning, etc. I purposely included the white electrical ‘finishing’ tape here. He was right, BTW.