I have several sets of gorgeous thick bathroom towels that basically look pretty and feel soft but don’t absorb any water from your body.
The only advice I have received from friends is to wash them several times. I have probably washed them about 40-odd times and I’m pretty sure that if they were going to improve, they would’ve by now.
So, dopers, I’m hoping somebody out there has had this problem and solved it or has heard of a possible cure. I’m at the point where I’d consider trying almost anything.
Well, first of all, they don’t work by remote control… you have to actually rub them on your body for… it… to… Sorry.
In my own (limited) experience with this phenomena, running them through a couple loads of laundry does work, or at least it did for us. If you’ve really done 'em up 40+ times, I’d say the buggers either need to be returned, or chemically stripped.
Incidentally, are you washing them with warm water, drying them on high heat in the dryer, or just hangin’ them out to dry? IIRC, 'twas the heat that supposedly did the trick for us, though where that advice came from I’d have to ask Mrs. Skeezix.
(And of course, some towels are only really useful on one side anyway, due to some fashion weirdness involving cutting off most of the little fabric loops that do the actual sucking of water… I’d swear Cecil’s devoted a column to this, or touched on it in one of the books…)
Do you use fabric softner? Sometimes fabric softner can build up and make towels less “thirsty”.
I went through a phase where I was just obsessed with fabric softner and used too much too often and I did notice the towels starting to act more water-repellent than absorbent. Try washing them in warm water and skipping the softner a time or two.
You might also try putting white vineagar in the rinse. It can help dissolve the excess softner from the towels. The easiest way I know of to do this is to get one or two Downy balls and fill them with the vineagar instead of softner and just throw them in when you start the load.
I only ever wash in cold and always hang dry towels, so I’ll give it a couple of washes in hot, and then chuck them in the dryer and see how that works.
I’ve never used fabric softener, so that’s not it, but I will also try the vinegar suggestion, if the dryer doesn’t do the trick.
I have a towel like that. I used to have two, received as a wedding present, but one has disappeared. And as I was drying, or attempting to dry, myself the other morning, I was wondering why I have put up with this behavior from this towel for 23 freakin’ years now? The darn thing is no longer a lovely pale green anymore. It barely absorbs water. But it just won’t fray, or get a hole, or do anything that will let my frugal soul drop it into the trash, or put it in the garage to use for washing the car. I curse the genes my mother gave me that prevent me from ridding my life of this underperforming piece of terrycloth. It was much easier to get rid of the husband!
So my advice is to bundle those towels up and give them to Goodwill, or the Salvation Army, or the Animal Protective League. Do not waste time or resources on them any longer! Learn from my mistakes!
The towels I bought to take to college were like that. They looked cool (black and gray! I’ll be the most stylin’ girl in the bathroom!), but they only served to move drops of water around on my body. Repeated use and washing may have helped a little, but not much. I eventually ditched the towels at home and took some of our family’s old towels back to school. So I’d advise you to give up on your towels and just get some other ones.
Let us know how it works out. I’ve been given advice, when getting new towels, wash them first in HOT water and dry hot as well, to improve the drying action.
Oo! I had some towels like those (worthy of a pit thread!) They were made of some terrible man-made textile – basically threads of acetate or something woven into the little loops, but still no more absorbent than a green garbage bag.
Most of the time really hot water and then a good cooking in a hot dryer did the trick. But one very nice looking batch of towels I got as a gift ended up going to the Salvation Army. They looked great, and were indestructible (never looked worn or beat up), but they were utterly useless for their intended purpose.
I got a big fluffy towel from my Mother that did that. Used it once–now it sits in a sad pile in the closet, waiting for the day I finally pay it attention. What in the world possesses manufacturers to make those?
