Quite a while back on a gaming board we had a discussion about hygiene issues. One of the problems a couple of people mentioned was that, no matter how often they bathed, they couldn’t seem to get rid of certain odors.
The light came on for more than one person when I said;
“How often do you wash your bath towel? It does you no good to shower, then simply ‘re-paint’ your body with the same bacteria every day by using a filthy towel.”
Washing their bedding and clothing was next on the hit parade for that particular problem.
We do not have an infinite supply of clean water. True, the water that goes out of your pipes eventually comes down again in the form of rain–but not necessarily in your backyard and not necessarily in your lifetime. The turnover time for oceanic water can be on the scale of millenia (or even longer).
We North Americans take this for granted. But if we lived in a place where we had to walk miles to the nearest well, we’d understand how smart it would be to not wash every thing that touches our skin. Our conveniences should make us grateful, not careless.
I use one towel to dry my hair and body (I have short hair). I usually change out once a week, but I’ve gone as long as two weeks.
Thank you. I thought to say something but I didn’t know how to properly put it. My mother and her sisters did live in a place & a time when they had to walk, not to the well, but to the one tap of water in the entire neighborhood. They would stand in line, sometimes for an hour or more, to get their water. Then they’d lug it back. That was their ration for the whole day. In hot times, the ration would be less.
My aunt often tells me these stories and I do *try *to take them as cautionary. Besides, live in India for a month or two and you really won’t bother to change your towel daily.
For both my husband and I, probably once every week or so, unless we lose track of time.
I had a roommate years ago who, in the six months he lived with us, appeared to never wash his towel. It was very stiff, and one day, it got soaked (don’t know how… though he tended to shower with the towel on the shower rod, so maybe it fell into the shower) and he hung it up to dry. It was dripping brown water. It was so disgusting. He “forgot” to take it with him when he moved out, we just put it into a garbage bag and chucked it. We didn’t want to try washing it with our own clothes!
I only own two towels and do my laundry every two weeks or so. I could be changing them every week and washing them both, but I forget and usually just use one the entire time between washings.
I’ve tried saving them, but the towel fairy collects them. This is the same towel fairy who takes two showers a day and wonders why her skin is so dry. When I did all my own laundry (as opposed to just most of it), I changed towels twice a week.
And hand towels gross me out. We keep a paper towel stand with a roll of paper towels in the bathroom, powder room, and kitchen.
I have 3 bath towels that I prefer to use and I have long hair that I wash 3 times a week. I wrap my hair up in a towel after I wash it and go to bed and then it lands on the floor sometime in the night and in the morning I put it in the hamper from there. So I change the towel about every 2 days. I’m a minimalist when it comes to towels. When someone comes over they have to dry their hands on my towel. Luckily nobody really fancy or really dirty ever comes over.
I do laundry daily. There are 4 adults in the house, and for towels, that adds up to…
Wait. I need to go check out the hamper, as I’m just getting ready to toss everything into the washer now, anyway.
Ok.
5 large bath towels
3 hand towels
2 washcloths
4 small bath towels
3 scrubbies
1 terrycloth bathmat.
This amount is just about what I wash every day (There are a couple extra towels per day right now, as hubby is on vacation. Without him being home, it’s just two towels less per day).
We use fresh towels for our body and for our hair, and we like to wash the scrubbies and bathmat each day, too.
The amount of clothes washed each day is a whole 'nother story! There are lots and lots of those, as we refuse to wear something more than once, without that particular garment being clean.
I keep a roll of paper towel in the bathroom (for drying your hands after washing them), but no one seems to use it but me. Everyone else uses hand towels.
Edit: I like to put on fresh sheets every couple of days. We have 4 cats and 2 very large, hairy dogs. They like to climb into bed with us. Apparently all the pet beds are NOT living up to their expectations.
You don’t need to live outside the rich Western World to have to think about conserving water either. Here in Melbourne we’ve been on water restrictions of some sort for the better part of a year now - and some country towns have gone through stages where they ran out of water altogether and had to have it trucked in (we just dodged the bullet of having to go on the most restrictive “Stage 4” - three weeks of rain! hallelujah!).
If you think about all the effort involved in having piped, clean drinking quality water delivered to your door - think storage, protection against contamination, purifying, testing - you can see how there’s an element of waste implied in using it to wash clothes and flush toilets.
As far as the OP goes … probably about once a week or so, there’s not really a schedule. Whenever they start to smell. I do wash them after we go swimming though, so that might put it up a little.
:shrug: when I was in college I doubt if I washed my towel any more often than VC03. Pinkeye? Rashes? What’s that? YMMV
Thanks. I was under the impression that it just disappeared forever.
Forget water for a minute. I’d like to avoid dumping cupfuls of detergent down the drain, and I’d like to avoid using the electricity for the washer and the dryer, as much as possible. I’m not fanatical* about any of this. I’m just trying to strike a balance between cleanliness and the use of resources, chemicals and energy.
(I know, if I’m not fantical about the subject, why in my initial post did I say that changing towels every day was a “grotesque waste of…”. I apologise. This board just gets the old hyperbole flowing…)
With a 3-month old baby, washing is pretty much a daily occurrence (we have desalinated water here).
Bath towels usually last 2-3 days and hand towels go about a week. Bath mats can go up to 3 weeks between washes. Of course, baby’s towel gets washed after every use. I just put the towel and her clothes in the same wash (small load). Her clothes go in a lingerie bag so they dont pick up towel fluff.
BTW Aspidistra, my parents are on the Gold Coast and have been on Level 5 water restrictions since April I think (4 minute showers and max 140 litres of water per person per day).
Oh, and this was one of the Google ads (probably NSFW) - too much talk about butt-washing and wiping methinks!
My body and hair towel are one in the same and I swtich it out about every three to four days. Once I get a new towel the old one becomes the towel for the floor.
I can’t have a bathmat as one of my cats will use it as her litter box.
The floor towel gets folded after it dries and hung over the side of the tub.
Rinse and repeat.
The BF changes his about once and week and same with my daughter.
They both use my floor towel.
All bath towels, hand towels and wash clothes are washed together in one large load in hot water except the BF and my daughters. They was their towels with their own laundry.
Holy crap! I’d never heard of Level 5 (I don’t think it’s ever happened here - in fact, I don’t remember it even going above 2 in previous summers). And yet, according to Wiki, it can theoretically go up as far as 8!!
Every time you rub the towel across your skin, thousands of dead skin cells, plus natural body oil, come off onto the towel. When you use that towel again, you rub the dead skin cells and body oil back onto your body.
In my bathroom, I have two big, pretty towels on the rack with two nice, shiny hand towels over them. I don’t ever use the big, pretty towels for anything unless my towel supply has run dry. The hand towels are thrown in with my laundry maybe twice a week (we have lots of friends coming and going) and the big, unused towels once a month.
In my room, I have a big basket of various towels for using when I shower. One for the hair- one for the body. I switch out towels probably every time or every other time I shower, but I don’t wash them until I have a nice big pile that I can throw in with my sheets at the end of the week.
As far as my sheets, I have three sets- one on the bed, two on deck. I change my sheets once a week, putting them in the hamper until my towels are ready to go.
I once read that changing your sheets more frequently allowed for better sleep. I don’t know if it’s true or if I’ve conned myself into believing it, but I really do sleep better on clean sheets. So, who knows.
