We don’t have many bath towels because they’re overpriced unless you get the thin ones. We have about 5 per bathroom, (2).
I barely get one damp, patting myself dry after a bath/shower. My husband’s towel gets damp, and he’ll use it a couple of times before tossing into the hamper.
My 6’4" son can’t dry himself without soaking the towel. I sometimes have to let it dry outside, ( I can’t stand damp towels in the hamper,) so he uses them once.
The only towels I use once are the thin ones, I wrap my hair in and washcloths.
I wash ours once a week. My husband and I have enough to have a dedicated towel each plus one for my hair and one as a bathmat. (So, four. Seems anticlimactic.) I have a ton of washcloths, though, and use a fresh one each time.
Edit: It was the same when we had kids at home. Everybody gets a towel, and if they want it washed they turn it in on washday.
You need something between “a few times” and “funky.” I wash mine every two weeks, which is a whole bunch of showers, but they’re far from funky at the end of that two weeks, since I used them on a clean body/hair and they are then hung up to dry.
We use ours for about a week, unless there’s some cleaning “crisis.” (Grabbed to clean a spill, that sort of thing.) Towels are hung to dry between showers, so they generally aren’t funky even after a week, but I wash them anyway. The big kids do their own laundry, so I sometimes have to remind them to wash their sheets and towels along with their clothes, but that’s expected at their ages.
I use three towels to dry off, for a total of three weeks each. A clean towel is used for a week for upper body, and then another week for lower body, then another week just for feet. IMO if you do a good job showering, there should be very little dirt or oil on a towel. Skin flakes, maybe, but you can just flip the towel to get rid of those.
Also, I hang my towels over two bars (each), so there is plenty of air circulating around them, and they are dry in an hour.
And I frankly don’t understand how anyone can take a shower without a hand-held showerhead, or one that lasts less than twenty minutes. Mine are typically half an hour.
I can shower, wash my hair AND do a perfunctory shave of my legs in just on five minutes. After that time, I’m not going to get any cleaner. It’s just water running down the drain.
Towels generally work on the same schedule as bed linens - they’re good for about a week between washing. It may be purely psychological but my brain tells me they need washing at that point.
Yeah, mine generally get used for a week, sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more.
I too don’t get my towels as damp as most people. When I’m done showering, I sort of kick my legs and swing my arms to fling off the water, then use my hands to sort of squeegee a lot of the water off my body and hair, THEN I use the towel to dry off completely. That way, towels tend to stay perfectly fresh for around a week.
We wash our bath linens once a week, usually along with about a week’s worth of clothes during a laundry frenzy on the weekend.
I can tell they’re not freshly washed after a week of use, but they’re hardly “funky” or in any way unusable. If things get particularly hectic and they get skipped for some reason (meaning they’re used for two weeks), I don’t fret.
We did this thread about 2-3 months ago. You should get a bunch of data from that one to add to this. As I said in that thread, usually 1-2 weeks between washes.
Towels, clothes, and sheets all get washed once a week. I use the same towel all week; my husband is a dirty boy and sometimes uses two, especially in summer when he’s doing a lot of yard work.
I try to replace the kitchen towels every day, though.
One of my non-frugal indulgences is using a clean towel every time I shower. I just prefer a perfectly clean, nice-smelling towel. Everyone else in this house tends to go multiple uses with their towel, but that’s their business.
I don’t see why some people would use a towel only once; consider how much more laundry you would have to do. That said, I wash them every couple weeks and while they don’t smell fresh after a few days they don’t stink (hung up to dry, plus there is a HVAC vent right under them so there is good air flow most of the year). Also, before I get out of the shower I use a wrung-out washcloth to partially dry myself off before finishing with the towel, so it doesn’t get that wet.
About five minute showers, I take about twice as long but then I actually spend time cleaning myself (as for water wastage, I run the water for a short time to wet myself then turn it off, then on again to rinse; hard to use soap if it is just washed off).