There are many mysteries of modern life that require a close and careful look to unravel. To see the fullness of the truth, you need a sense of detachment from established wisdom and protocols that are routinely taken for granted, baked into our habits of thinking and doing in ways that are largely unquestioned.
At issue are a series of burning questions, among which: why are our current systems of doing laundry so arduous and ultimately ineffective? The laundry piles up and up, and you gather it all and throw it in with the usual steps. It finally comes out of the dryer but, over time, you notice that your whites get ever more dull and everything else seems vaguely oily and short of what we used to call clean.
We’ve all adapted, lowering our expectations year by year and finally just giving up and going along. This is just how life works. It’s pathetic but unchangeable.
In these pages, I’ve explored many angles of this problem, among which tepid water temperature, weak and shallow machines, compromised detergents, and ineffective additives. There is truth to all of them but here I will add another element that might be decisive depending on circumstances in your household.
A hidden offender is the modern towel. You know the type. They are huge, thick, puffy, absorbent, made of cotton terry cloth, and called luxurious and wonderful in the marketing. It seems like something you want. Who doesn’t desire that feeling of being wrapped in luxury following a bath, shower, or swim? Doesn’t thickness serve as a proxy for quality and luxury?
This entire model is not only wrong. It is ruining your laundry and your life. Here is how.
A large and plush towel absorbs vast amounts of water, up to a quarter and even half a gallon.
What does this imply? It means that of course it will dry you off after you leave the tub or shower but now you have zero incentive to do what was once a normal routine, namely drip dry for a bit before wrapping the towel around your body. Instead you just stand up soaking wet and let the towel take care of the rest.
It makes no sense. The drain is there for a reason. But we do it because we can.
Then we hang the towel up. It hangs there in a steamy room, one of the worst rooms in the house for ventilation. It’s also the room with the toilet which adds an additional and unfortunate factor to the mix. It takes a very long time to dry, during which time it accumulates mold, mildew, bacteria, and stinkiness.
You use the towel for a few more times but at some point you notice that it is stinky and making your body stinky, which then requires you cover yourself in deodorants, cologne, lotions, and powders to cover up the vague sense of mildew smell.
Finally you throw it in the laundry and get another. This goes on and on until laundry day comes. There are three towels, some hand towels, and maybe some washcloths.
You put them in with the whites or colors or whatever is being washed in that load.
Here is where the disaster begins to unfold. The towels are designed to be extremely absorbent. Modern washing machines are highly penurious in water use. The water is tepid anyway because of restrictions. And there is not much of it at all, not nearly enough actually to wash much less rinse clothing.
Here’s the key: the towels quickly and greedily suck up all the water in the machine, leaving everything else just to spin in the great nothingness that results. Nothing else is genuinely washed because the towels hog everything.
Then spin at the end of the cycle but you notice that the towels are wetter than everything else. That’s because they absorbed the lion’s share of the load of water, robbing everything else of the opportunity to be washed. Then they go to the dryer and the same repeats. It takes extra long to dry them as the rest of the load stays vaguely moist.
Fed up, you finally just grab the load and put the clothes away, maybe just a bit wet with the hope that hanging them will finish the drying. But because they are now in a tight closet or drawer, they too develop mildew and mold, adding to a layer that was not cleaned off during the washing precisely because of the presence of the evil towels.
You see what is happening here? Your plush, thick towel is actually the source of all your problems! You just did not know this.
There is an easy fix for this.
If you travel abroad, especially to Greece or Turkey, you will notice that the towels are completely different. They are thin and with waffle texture and often made of linen, not cotton. Why might this be? There is a simple answer: they dry quickly on their own.
That’s the whole thing. No mold, mildew, bacteria, and muck. After just a few hours, or even 30 minutes in the warm sun, they are dry as a bone. They smell perfectly clean, which makes sense because the water that was on them is also clean because you just got out of the shower.
These towels need to be washed far less, a fraction as much, because they stay dry between uses. They do not get stinky and unsanitary. When the time comes to wash them, you can throw them into the wash and they do not disturb the water equilibrium. Everything else in the load now has a fair chance to get clean too. Same with drying. Your dryer will leave everything dry in the appointed time or much less.
A good and classic linen towel will change everything. To be sure, they are more expensive. You can look it up on merchant sites like Amazon and search for large linen bath towels. They will run about $50 each or so, which seems like a lot but remember that you only need one or two or just one for each member of the family.
What to do with the huge stack of puffy, luxurious, plush bath towels that takes up vast space in your closet? My strong suggestion: pick up the pile in your arms and march it immediately to the trash bin. Get rid of it now and forever, replacing it with one or a few large linen towels.
This will go a long way toward fixing your laundry problem and many other problems in life, among which that creepy feeling that your towel is porting some strange stink from itself to your body.
How it is that Americans ever got tricked by these other terry-cloth towels is something of a mystery. We are unusual suckers for the pitch and the belief that we should always upgrade our lives. We came to believe that the thicker the towel, the better.
It’s all rubbish. Your towels are ruining everything. Now that you know, you can fix it... and write to thank me later.
