[QUOTE=Walloon]
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.
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Well, I don’t know how people have been getting along with so much dead skin cells climbing back onto their bodies. It is certainly food for thought, I daresay. You won’t mind if I keep my hygenic habits, will you? I hate to break a good streak.
I usually swap towels a couple times a week. I use a sisal cloth to scrub with, and that gets laundered once a week.
Well, considering your screenname, you should be some sort of authority on the matter.
Between once a week and once every 2 weeks, depending on the weather and my laundry schedule.
Never had e. coli, pink eye or skin rashes either.
[QUOTE=DiosaBellissima]
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.
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What is it with girls and having towels that aren’t meant to be used?
I didn’t have more than two sets of towels until this past year. My mom sent me 4 sets of towels because she thought they were too plain and took up too much space in the linen closet. It made my day because now I actually have a clean towel on deck for company.
When you get to the bottom of that answer, work on the decorative soap quandry, please.
[QUOTE=Frosted Glass]
What is it with girls and having towels that aren’t meant to be used?
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These aren’t fru fru stupid towels or anything, just regular, cotton bath towels. I don’t use them because, well, I want to have some towels there when guests come. The same reason I have a spare set of drinking glasses that I don’t really use (or need), I keep them around if guests stop by so I don’t have to rush to do some dishes.
And decorative soap is dumb. I have some really nice, rose scented soap that I got super discounted. The soap has a pretty rose design across the top, but duh- it’s soap, use it. I tell my guests, they don’t listen. So I smashed down the decorative part of the soap and now they use it.
[QUOTE=DiosaBellissima]
These aren’t fru fru stupid towels or anything, just regular, cotton bath towels. I don’t use them because, well, I want to have some towels there when guests come. The same reason I have a spare set of drinking glasses that I don’t really use (or need), I keep them around if guests stop by so I don’t have to rush to do some dishes.
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Oh ok. That makes more sense I guess.
Does everyone else feel the need to instantly toss a towel that someone else has used into the hamper, even if it was only used once? I was talking about this with one of my guy friends and he said that he leaves it on the rack until his own towel gets dirty then he proceeds to use the once-used one. For some reason that bugged me.
[QUOTE=DiosaBellissima]
And decorative soap is dumb. I have some really nice, rose scented soap that I got super discounted. The soap has a pretty rose design across the top, but duh- it’s soap, use it. I tell my guests, they don’t listen. So I smashed down the decorative part of the soap and now they use it.
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That’s hilarious. I really hate decorative soap. Even more than I hate people who put lotion on one side of the sink and soap on the other in unmarked containers.
[QUOTE=Least Original User Name Ever]
Well, considering your screenname, you should be some sort of authority on the matter.
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Eh, I’m a live-and-let-live kinda person. 
[QUOTE=Frosted Glass]
Does everyone else feel the need to instantly toss a towel that someone else has used into the hamper, even if it was only used once? I was talking about this with one of my guy friends and he said that he leaves it on the rack until his own towel gets dirty then he proceeds to use the once-used one. For some reason that bugged me.
[/QUOTE]
If we’re talking a visitor using a bath towel, absolutely.
Once I grabbed my (male) roommate’s towel by mistake in the morning. I was mildly skeeved by the thought of my having used his towel, and figured he’d feel the same, so I replaced it with a fresh one. When I told him what I’d done, he just shrugged and said “whatever, you didn’t have to bother…” But it would have bugged me to know he kept using it after I did, and that’d be the same for anybody.
[QUOTE=Walloon]
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.
[/QUOTE]
I’ve long been in the habit of changing bath towels after every other use, or even after only one use if there was a noticeable smell. I assume the smell comes from bacteria going to work on the dead skin cells, body oil, sweat, etc., that was left behind on the towel.
But, when I acquired this habit, I was living in a house without a working shower, so that I had to take baths, which I assume would leave more residue behind on my skin than a shower would. Now that I take showers, I may have to re-think my personal policy.
(After doing its two days’ duty to wipe me dry after bathing, the towel would spend the next couple of days serving as a bath mat, and would sometimes be used after that to wipe up spills.)
[QUOTE=Aspidistra]
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.
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As much as the water restrictions suck, I kind of like the mass water-conserving movement. Going to friends’ houses and seeing buckets in the sink, people installing rainwater tanks and buying water-efficient washing machines - it’s nice. 
As for the OP I change towels once a week. Guest towels get changed after single use.
I’m a little late but I’ll chime in, anyway. I use 2 towels, hair and body. They get washed about every week to week and a half, though sometimes I just get a fresh “body” towel, and start using the old one for my hair. If for some reason I leave a towel anywhere that a cat might lay on it(they aren’t allowed in the cellar, where the shower is), it gets replaced immediately. There’s something very un-fun about drying yourself off and realizing you’re covered in little gray hairs.
I use two towels: one for my hair and the other for my bod. Today’s hair towel becomes tomorrow’s body towel. Today’s body towel becomes tomorrow’s towel to stand on.