I’m probably not an expert on “best practices” for bath towels since I’m a young bachelor.
So yeah. If I think of it, I will wash them regularly. But usually it comes down to “hmm, these towels ain’t quite fresh. Probably time to wash them.”
Same with bedsheets, unless fun-time has occurred.
If I just hang it up in the bathroom the towel will get a funky smell fairly quickly. But if I hang it up somewhere that it will dry quickly then it stays pretty fresh for a long time.
There are four us in this house, and that generates a lot of laundry. shrugs That and towels and sheets.
Don’t you people wash your clothes? Yeesh.
2-3 times. Don’t want to wait until funky.
Ever since Coast Guard bootcamp, 75% of my showers have been sea showers. I can wash my shoulder-length hair, shave pits/legs/bikini, and soup up and rinse in less than ten minutes. This is from a normal shower head. I have the detachable piece, but never use it.
As to the OP: I keep a towel for about a week. Whenever I do a couple loads of laundry, usually about once a week.
One time only.
I use the same towels for hand and bath. So yesterday’s hand towel becomes today’s bath towel. If I used them more than once, I’d never remember how many times I’ve used it.
I will use the same towel for a week. I live in a hot, dry part of the country, so they dry out pretty quickly.
I wash them every time I use them. They get stinky, don’t they? And if you dry your underbody and the next day your face with it…yiek.
While I’d like to be able to indulge myself, and use a new towel with each shower, some of us have jobs and kids and other things going on that prevent us from doing laundry every single day. In addition, right now I have to schlepp it all to the laundromat, so towels get used more than once out of necessity.
Plus, if your* towels smell funky after one or two uses, I think you need to re-evaluate your showering standards. If you’re clean when you get out and dry yourself off, the towel isn’t going to be that dirty. Yes, I know you’re sloughing off dead skin cells when you dry yourself, but unless you’re drying yourself with a Brillo pad or sand paper, c’mon…it won’t be that bad.
I follow a pattern similar to what someone else mentioned.
Fresh, dry towel: hair, face, upper body. Second use: crotch, crack and below. Third use: goes on the floor and maybe a final wipe of the feet.
If I’m running low on towels, I don’t mind using them again, but in general the above is the rule, although once a floor towel it has to go to the laundry.
I voted “wait until they get funky”. Funky, in my case, is the slightest whiff of mildew, which usually translates to tossing all the towels in with the weekly(ish) laundry.
Ok so we’ve established that everyone (save one person) will at least change their towels out at some point. We’ve also established that, you’re going to get to a point where the towel starts to smell funky. This is because no matter how hard you scrub (and no one takes a loofah to every square inch of the body every shower) you’re going to leave stuff behind every shower drying.
So it really then comes down to how much you desire a dirty towel.
Me? Not so much. I use it twice and switch.
I usually go through 2-3 towels a week.
Holy crap, the shower is supposed to get that off you… seriously, you’re supposed to be clean when you’re done washing, that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?
Use bodybrush or something.
Don’t you wash your crotch? What about oral sex, which is essentially face + crotch? Do you really regard your clean body with that much loathing?
I find this level of germophobia to be bizarre.
I’d probably do more laundry if it didn’t cost me $3 a load and I had a window of time larger than a 4.5hr block on the weekend. What, I want to do something on a Saturday afternoon? Say goodbye to your chance to do laundry!
I chose ‘funky’, btw.
Not for me - any eventual funky smell comes from a slight mildew odor, and into the wash it goes.
If my towel started smelling like body smell, I’d have to sign up for some how to wash properly lessons.
Jesus Christ, no. Even if I didn’t live in a one bedroom flat, with no tumbledryer, in a country that rains a lot, I don’t think I’d be that wasteful.
Oh, and Guinastasia, I do a clothes wash about twice a week. It’s quite normal- i own more than one of most clothing items, you see.
Same here, then into the laundry. I actually had no idea this was unusual until I read this thread.
But isn’t your crotch clean, since you just washed it?
Wow, I had no idea I was taking a military style shower. My shower stall is small and there’s no room to move away from the water in order to lather up properly. So, I just turn it off while lathering.