JACKIE: … towels especially. It’s because cotton and linen are more absorbent. They’re porous fibers naturally, and so they’re thirsty. I’m not talking about roman-tasy levels of thirst here. I just mean that they physically want to soak up a lot of water.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.
ROSIE: I’m Rosie Guerin. And you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.
CAIRA: This episode is called You Deserve Better Towels.
ROSIE: Guys, I was doing some laundry last night, and I realized at a certain point that I had folded eight towels. But the thing about this, and I know this sounds random, but the thing about this is none of them matched.
CAIRA: Oh, yeah.
ROSIE: And then I was starting to go back through my personal history, trying to remember where all of these towels came from. They’re all in varying forms of degradation, I think maybe is a good way to put it. And I was thinking that maybe it’s time for an overhaul. Right?
CAIRA: I just feel like that’s how you come to collect towels over your life. It’s like a really boring collector’s item.
ROSIE: I feel like leveling up is having a full set of matching towels.
CAIRA: I mean-
ROSIE: I feel like, Christine, you have a full set of matching towels.
CHRISTINE: I do.
CAIRA: You definitely have to.
ROSIE: Yeah, I’m good.
CHRISTINE: Of course I do.
CAIRA: Are they all the same color too?
CHRISTINE: Well, you know what? Actually, I have a couple sets in different colors, but I will tell you that I didn’t actually achieve that until my late thirties, early forties.
ROSIE: Is it fair to conclude that perhaps, Caira, you do not have a full set of matching towels?
CAIRA: Don’t look at me right now. She’s setting me up because she knows I only have one towel.
CHRISTINE: Wait a minute. That seems pretty extreme.
ROSIE: I’m worried for you.
CHRISTINE: Are you like monastic person or something? You just have one chair in your apartment and one towel.
CAIRA: Okay, call me out, Christine.
ROSIE: One dangling bulb.
CAIRA: Yes. Actually, that’s my entire life, but I had a towel collection, but all of them just got so raggedy so fast, are now all just rags. And then now I just have one functioning towel.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, this is actually, I think pretty common. Towels are kind of one of those things that they don’t last forever. They get raggedy and it can be expensive to buy nice ones that will last. There’s also just a ton of options out there. So I think there can be a little bit of decision fatigue to kind of figure out what you want.
CAIRA: And they’re not cheap.
CHRISTINE: No, they’re not cheap.
CAIRA: So many things we talk about.
CHRISTINE: I’ve also edited a lot of our towel coverage and I just know that in general, towels can be really polarizing. If you are in a partnership with someone and you like one kind of towel and they like a different kind of towel, it can be kind of hard to decide which ones to get. So they’re just very, very subjective things.
CAIRA: I get that. I covered mattresses for a few years and obviously people have different tastes, but the wonderful thing about towels is that you don’t have to share. You can just get your own set
ROSIE: That’s true. Yeah. BYO towel.
CAIRA: I’m thankful that we of course have somebody to talk to about this. And that person is Jackie Reeve. Jackie is our in-house expert who knows a ton about textiles, but she specifically covers towels and sheets as you guys may remember from when we had our episode with her a few months ago. Hopefully she’s going to help me and all of us find a set of towels that we all like so we never have to think about this problem ever again, or at least for the next five to 10 years maybe.
CHRISTINE: Jackie’s going to walk us through the different kinds of towels you can buy, secrets to figuring out the real texture of a towel before you invest in an entire set, which this is going to save you money in the long run and how to care and maintain for all of your towels. That’s all coming up after the break. See you in a sec.
CAIRA: Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show. With us now is Jackie Reeve, who’s a senior staff writer at Wirecutter. It’s so amazing. She’s covered everything from bath towels to rugs even. So she actually told us in her sheets episode that she has a whole second laundry room in her basement just for all the things that she tests for Wirecutter, which is wild.
CHRISTINE: That’s truly wild. Jackie, welcome to the show.
JACKIE: Thank you.
CHRISTINE: It’s really great to have you on again. I love talking about sheets the last time with you and something that I think is just wild is you told us a little bit about the setup in your house for testing all of the textiles that you test at home. You test sheets, you test blankets, obviously towels. How many towels do you think you currently have in your home?
JACKIE: Oh my God. Towels? Do you mean towels that have become rags because I’ve tested them into the ground?
CHRISTINE: Yeah. Towels. Yeah. That counts.
JACKIE: Or do you mean towels that you actually clean your body with.
CAIRA: Both.
JACKIE: Couple dozen probably. I try to donate them on if they’re not in terrible shape. But yeah, a lot of them become rags and that doesn’t count the ones that live in our greenhouse and outside with my chicken coop supplies. So the ones that are physically in the house, I’m sure I have at least a couple dozen.
CHRISTINE: And how long have you been testing towels for Wirecutter?
JACKIE: Since 2017.
CHRISTINE: Okay. Wow. Long time.
CAIRA: Okay, so a common complaint that we see on Wirecutter is just about the absorbency. People just don’t seem to like that their towels don’t seem to be that absorbent or they don’t think that they absorb water well. Are there some towels that are just more absorbent than others? What’s really going on there?
JACKIE: I mean, yes, there are towels that are more absorbent than others, but one of the tricky things with testing these is that humans do not actually have a wetness receptor.
CAIRA: What?
ROSIE: What does that mean?
JACKIE: We don’t have a mechanism for identifying wetness directly. What our brains do is they formed all these other pathways and senses to tell when something is wet, but we cannot actually identify wetness like, insects can, but we can’t. So what we use to detect wetness, temperature, because when things are cold, we tend to identify them as wet more than when they’re warm. So if you’ve ever taken a load of clothes out of your dryer when they’ve sat for a while, if they feel cold and you can’t tell if they’re wet or not. And so that happens to me all the time.
ROSIE: I have had knocked down, dragged out arguments about whether the clothes are cold or wet.
JACKIE: Yes. Yeah.
ROSIE: I never knew why, because I always think they’re just cold.
JACKIE: Yeah, I do too. And I run them in the dryer for another 20 minutes even psychologically, because if they take the laundry out warm, I think it’s dry so that makes it feel dry.
CHRISTINE: And I’ve gotten in trouble in the past for doing laundry, taking it out warm and then finding out later it’s clammy after it’s cooled off and then been like, “Oh, I didn’t dry it enough, but I thought it was dry when I took it out of the dryer.”
JACKIE: A hundred percent. And that’s one of the other senses that we use. So we basically use temperature and texture. And so the way it feels, you can sort of tell if something’s clammy or if you get dressed and you’re still damp and your clothes stick to you. You can tell that there’s still moisture on your skin, but technically we do not have a wetness receptor. Smell comes in later. Have you ever done a load of laundry and you think it’s good and dry and you fold it and put away, and then sometime later you pull a shirt out of a pile and you realize it stinks a little bit? It was probably not totally dry. That’s one of my least favorite sensations ever.
CHRISTINE: It’s one of my least favorite smells, honestly.
CAIRA: Yeah. I know. It’s awful. It’s just moldy. God, it sounds like humans need a software update. That’s such a flaw in our design.
JACKIE: Yeah. Isn’t that weird?
CHRISTINE: Or we need like a bug companion to let us know, like our little assistant.
CAIRA: Yeah.
JACKIE: Yes. So if you take that into account and you think about how different humans respond to temperature, if you live with someone who’s always changing the thermostat to the opposite of whatever you want it to be, you run hot, someone runs cold, that makes it really tricky to pin down wetness. But I think because those things are really different from person to person, then to me, that means that the way a towel feels to someone when they’re drying off and that sense of how well it’s absorbing is going to be different from person to person. Everyone will kind of experience it differently, which a lot of the things I test, it’s really subjective and it sort of makes identifying the best anything challenging because I can try and find the best thing for the most people, but it’s never going to be perfect.
CHRISTINE: Right.
ROSIE: So it must be then really difficult to actually test absorbency in an empirical way.
JACKIE: Yeah. We would need a lab really to be able to tell. So it’s wildly challenging. And so when I’ve done panel tests for towels, I rarely have someone give me the same answer for absorbency. I don’t get a consensus when I do that. Everybody experiences it differently. And so a lot of what I’m looking at is texture, which is also different from person to person, but texture, overall quality, how it washes, does it pill, does it fall apart, does it hold its color? All that good stuff.
ROSIE: So Jackie, this question might be simplistic, but I do want to zoom all the way out. Can you lay out for us the main types of towels you can get? What are my options if I’m going into a store and shopping online?
JACKIE: All right. So a terry towel is the most common in the US. It’s been sort of generally the most popular for years. And it is made with loops of yarn that are attached to a base layer from both sides. So it’s going to be loops on the front and the back. It is heavy because it just has more material in it. The way they’re constructed is not dissimilar to a carpet.
CHRISTINE: And we think of these terry towels as the plushest, softest kind of towel, right?
JACKIE: Yes. Think of it as like a classic sort of hotel towel. Wrap yourself up in it. It’s really soft. If you are someone who likes to wrap up in a towel and hang out in it for a while, a good plush terry towel feels amazing. Terry towels are going to be the heaviest towels by weight, and that’s actually a feature, not a bug. Part of how terry towels are measured and advertised is by weight. And because there’s so much material on them and it sticks up off the surface, they take up more room to store
CAIRA: Ok so that’s terry towels… The next type of towel is waffle towels. Tell us about those.
Waffle towels are, I would say on the rise and they look like waffles. They are very light and they have sort of a 3D look to them. So they’re covered in tiny little pockets of material. You can look into them and see some dimension like a pie lattice or a honeycomb. It’s woven with just layers of yarn. There’s no material in the middle that a waffle towel is attached to. It is just straight woven on a loom with layers of yarn going over and under each other in a pattern to make those little 3D pockets that you could just plop some butter and syrup into.
And so if you held a waffle towel up to the light, you probably could see through it because it’s just yarns in layers. Whereas a terry towel, you can’t see through it because there is material in the middle that both sides, those loops are attached to. And so by weight, waffle towels are super lightweight and because you can see through them, they dry pretty well. They do the job with less material basically.
CAIRA: I feel like I associate waffle towels with like spa groves and spa towel.
JACKIE: Yeah. They have a very spa vibe for sure. I think of terry towels as classic, blush, fat, hotel towels and waffle towels as soothing spa towels.
It’s very stretchy, too. Just the way its woven, it has a little bit more give. And so that is appealing for some people. Different body shapes, things like that. And cons are that they snag really easily because that material, the way it’s made, all those yarns are just very accessible to the surface of a towel. So if you hang it on a hook, you could stretch out a hole in it. If you snag it on something, you could pull out a thread of yarn and distort it.
And also people have really strong reactions to the texture of waffle towels. I don’t want to say scratchy because that makes it sound like a negative, but that’s something that we hear a lot for feedback on waffle towels is that they feel scratchier than a terry towel. And some people really are into it. We also talk to a lot of people, and Christine, I think you’re in this camp too, that they like a little texture to the towel.
CHRISTINE: I do. I like a little scratchiness. I don’t like to be pampered by my towel. I want it to scratch me a little bit.
CAIRA: But you like a terry towel the best, don’t you?
CHRISTINE: No, no. My husband likes the terry towel and I actually prefer your next category, Jackie.
JACKIE: Yes. And I know this. Peshtemal towels. I know this is your jam. So peshtemal towels, maybe 10, I don’t know, 10 years ago before waffle towels started to become the ones I see the most. Peshtemal towels were a popular alternative. And they are sometimes also called Turkish towels, which can be confusing because terry towels are sometimes also called Turkish towels just because of where the cotton is grown. But let’s say a Turkish style towel, a peshtemal towel, it’s going to be flat woven, kind of like a tea towel, super thin. There’s no height to it, so there’s no material standing up from a base. And again, if you held it up to the light, it’s pretty densely woven. You’re not going to be able to see through it. I would say it’s probably the lightest of the three and certainly the easiest to store in a closet. They fold up really flat.
Some people use them as beach towels because they’re really easy to throw in a bag too and just be on the go with it. The cons are, again, people find them too thin and scratchy because it’s just straight flat yarn that you’re rubbing back and forth across your body. It’s just going to have a different feel to it than terry. And another con that we hear from people is that they feel more wet after you use them than a waffle or terry towel. And that’s because they’re flat. Whatever water you transfer to it is right there on the surface, so they’re going to feel cold and a little clammy immediately.
And some people, when the towel feels really wet, it gives them this feeling like you’re just moving water around and you’re just touching a cold, clammy thing to your body. It doesn’t actually feel to some people like it’s getting you dry.
ROSIE: So Christine, is it masochism or what is it that makes you love the peshtemal? Talk about it.
CHRISTINE: I like that they’re lightweight. I do like a little texture. So the peshtemal towels I like, they’re not super scratchy, but I really like that I can wrap them around my body. And I’m not like with a terry cloth towel that’s really thick, it’s kind of hard to wrap it around your body and keep it on.
JACKIE: You fasten it too.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. Fasten it.
JACKIE: It’s more rigid.
CHRISTINE: Peshtemal is so lightweight that you can just wrap it around. I can walk around. I kind of almost feel like I’m wearing a robe or something. And my kids also really like the peshtemal. Now, my husband hates it. He does not like it. He feels like it’s just pushing the water around. He also doesn’t like that it does get really wet. Think about just having a huge tea towel and wrapping it around your body. That would be really gross for some people. And for me, I think it’s awesome. I like it.
CAIRA: I’m team your husband. I do not like that feeling, not a fan.
JACKIE: Peshtemal towels are popular in hot climates where, if you lived in the tropics, would you want to wrap up in a terry towel? Maybe not.
CHRISTINE: No.
JACKIE: That just might be a lot to deal with.
CHRISTINE: I think that’s why I like them, because I really just want to be living in the tropics.
JACKIE: Right. You can imagine it has kind of a beach vibe, beach spa hotel. That’s how I sort of think of the three categories.i
CHRISTINE: Okay. We’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, Jackie is going to debunk some towel myths. We’ll be right back.
CHRISTINE: Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show. This episode we’re talking with Jackie Reeve, our textile expert, and we’re talking all about towels.
CAIRA: It’s always so fun with Jackie.
CHRISTINE: It really is.
CAIRA: So if you’re out in the wild and you want to buy a good towel, what do you recommend, Jackie, people look for on labels?
JACKIE: So a hundred percent cotton first or linen. And a cotton linen blend is also fine, but you just want it to be entirely made up of natural fibers.
ROSIE: Why is that the case?
JACKIE: With towels especially, it’s because cotton and linen are more absorbent. They’re porous fibers naturally. And so they’re thirsty, not thirsty like…
ROSIE: Like they want to end up in your shopping cart.
JACKIE: Not thirsty like BookTok thirsty. Yeah. No, thirsty like they absorb a lot of water. I’m not talking about roman-tasy levels of thirsty here. I just mean that they physically want to soak up a lot of water. And so synthetic towels, like those fibers are finer. They’re much smaller, thinner material, and so they don’t have as much space to hold water as a good natural fiber like cotton or linen, and they feel totally different. And so yeah, we tend to just recommend cotton and linen because they’re the most durable, and so they last longer. They feel great and they’re fantastic.
ROSIE: What about microfiber that supposedly dries super fast?
JACKIE: Don’t do it.
ROSIE: But no, no, no. But what about another nostalgia hit? Why are we all not just toweling off our bodies with the chamois?
JACKIE: Don’t do it. Don’t do it. I mean…
ROSIE: But that thing absorbs six gallons of water. I saw it on TV.
CAIRA: But do you remember what it feels like when it dries off?
JACKIE: It’s like trying to towel off with a sheet of cardboard.
CHRISTINE: Yeah.
ROSIE: Okay.
CHRISTINE: Well, also because a chamois is kind of one type of material, and then a microfiber cloth is another type of material. And we have a lot of cleaning guides and we recommend microfiber cloths in almost every single one of those guides. And it’s because they have these little fibers that are really great at picking up dust and they don’t leave streaks and stuff, but if you touch those with your skin, it feels like those little fibers are grabbing onto your skin in a very unpleasant way.
CAIRA: It’s so gross.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, it’s not like a scratchy nice way. It’s kind of like a I got you.
CAIRA: Like it’s trying to invade you.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. It’s not nice.
CAIRA: When I clean with microfiber, I have to wear gloves. The texture is so unsettling.
ROSIE: You can’t pick it up in the winter if you have dry skin.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, it just like you’re going to be flipping your hand trying to get rid of it. Yeah.
JACKIE: The static alone, don’t dry yourself off with a microfiber towel and then touch a metal doorknob. It’ll ruin the day. You heard it here first, folks.
ROSIE: If you walk away with nothing.
Let’s say I know I like a plush towel for example. I can go into a store and feel a bunch of terry towels and pick the one that feels softest. Is that going to be enough to know if I’ll continue to like the way it feels and dries me off once I get home and take it for a spin?
JACKIE: Yes and no. It does make a lot of sense to touch towels in a store to see how they feel. However, what I think you’re really looking for is do I like how fat this is? Do I like the weight of this? Do I like the… Do you run your hand over it? Do I like the way the terry loops kind of move in the wind? That kind of thing. But just like with sheets and every other textile that I write about and we talk about, towels come with a ton of finishes on them. And so how a towel feels on a store shelf or when it arrives at your house brand new is probably not the way it’s going to feel after a few washes. And in fact, we definitely recommend wash your towels at least one time before you use them. And it takes about five washes to get all traces of those new finishes out of a textile.
And towels use a ton of them because if you think about it, they’re more saturated with dye than a lot of other household textiles. They’re more colorful and boldly colorful than your sheets and some blankets even. They’re really rich and that’s because they just have lots of dye in them and so that changes the surface feel of a towel when you have that much dye in it. And also they don’t want those dyes to fade before you, the shopper, gets them and gets to go, “Oh, look at this amazing red towel.” And so they put a ton of things.
You know how you put moisturizer on your skin to keep it locked in. Right? Towels are the same. And so part of the manufacturing process involves putting a lot of extra things to make them soft, to make them lustrous, to make them look amazing, and to keep that color on them as long as possible. And so you can absolutely touch a towel in a store to get a sense of whether or not you like it, but in terms of softness and how it’s going to feel on your body after a shower, you really need to wash them a bunch of times before you get all of those extras out and get to the true feel.
ROSIE: My mom is out in the world evangelizing your coverage. Jackie on Wirecutter specifically about sheets.
JACKIE: Oh, my gosh. Rosie’s mom is my biggest fan.
ROSIE: Yeah. And she came over the other day and she bought me a set of L.L.Bean flannel sheets because she knows the way to my heart.
JACKIE: Of course she did.
ROSIE: And then she’s talking to me about, she’s like, “Well, you got to wash them because the conditioners and the this.” And I’m like, “Do you listen to my show? Do you know Jackie Reeve?” So anyway, a lot of this is ringing true and I love it. And it’s interesting to me that it is a lot of the same stuff for towels as well.
JACKIE: It’s true for towels. It’s maybe even more true for towels than it is for sheets because you’re using towels in one of the most vulnerable situations you could be in. Right? It is right in all the nooks and crannies of your naked body.
CAIRA: Yes. It is.
JACKIE: And so how it feels is one of the most important things about how it works, especially tied into how we sort of understand wetness and all that kind of stuff. And so you definitely have to wash them several times, which makes it really challenging to buy six towels at once.
CHRISTINE: Well, this is something I want to ask you. So okay, if you’re going to buy six towels, that’s a big investment. That’s like 15 to 30 bucks a towel.
JACKIE: At least.
CHRISTINE: You don’t want to buy a bunch of towels, wash them five times and be like, “Oh, I actually don’t like these.”
JACKIE: “Oh, I hate this.”
CHRISTINE: Yeah, that’s a very frustrating experience. So what’s your advice to get a sense of what that towel will feel like?
JACKIE: I would say buy one bath towel first and see if you actually like it before you commit to buying more. Having said that, that also comes with its own challenges, especially for more budget-friendly towels because one thing that we run into with our guide all the time, our top and upgrade picked towels are expensive. And a big part of why that is because they are consistently available. More high-end towels don’t get discontinued as often, but a budget towel, like a towel from Target or Walmart, maybe even Amazon, they get discontinued constantly. And so our budget picks are the first ones to disappear. Sometimes even while I’m writing a guide, I’ll be like, “This is a great new budget towel” and I’ve had it just disappear while I’m writing the guide. They go that fast.
CAIRA: That’s so frustrating.
JACKIE: It’s so frustrating.
CHRISTINE: Basically you buy a cheap towel, you need to go home and wash it immediately five times and then decide, just you’ve got a whole weekend task ahead of you.
CAIRA: And then if you like it, you go and buy it in bulk.
ROSIE: Right. Call out of work, go home and wash it five times.
CAIRA: I’m sorry. I have an emergency.
ROSIE: And buy 300 of them.
JACKIE: I give you permission to take a day off work to do a towel experiment and find what you like and then go back and stock up on them because we cannot promise that they will still be there.
CAIRA: So now that we know what we’re looking for, can you tell us how much we should expect to spend on each type of towel?
JACKIE: Yeah. Good news is you don’t have to spend a fortune. The bad news is you very well might.
CAIRA: Oh, no.
JACKIE: So for a terry towel, the good ones that I’ve tested can be as low as like $15, which is where a lot of our budget picks end up landing. They can be as much as $50 or more, and inflation has some things to do with that. Two of our longer running terry picks are close to that $50 range, but for our top pick towel, that Frontgate towel.
CHRISTINE: Which is a super plush terry towel.
JACKIE: Such a nice towel. Yeah, it is a really great towel, but it is significantly more expensive today than it was when we first recommended it in 2017. It was 28 or $29 when I first tested it, and I think it’s currently 44.
CHRISTINE: Wow.
JACKIE: But the towel itself really hasn’t changed. It has just gone up, for whatever reason. Waffle towels are consistently more expensive. We’ve found some really great budget waffle lately, and that’s a pretty new addition to the world of towels that we’ve been testing. But good waffle towels are often 50 bucks, so waffle is typically more expensive. And then peshtemal is sort of similar. It’s in the sort of maybe 30 to $50 price range for a good one. I mean, Christine, I don’t know how much you spend. I know you love them.
CHRISTINE: I do. I’ve spent up to 30. I also have these Amazon ones that are made out of cotton that I really like. They’re like six for 36.
CAIRA: Oh, my gosh.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, they’re super cheap. I like them. I don’t know.
CAIRA: I like that. I have one final question: How long should you expect a quality towel to last?
JACKIE: Five to 10 years for good towel and that sort of tracks with the testing I’ve done at this point. I still have and use the first Frontgate towel that I tested in 2017. And it obviously does not feel the same as a brand new towel, but it is closer than you would think. It’s pretty fantastic.
CAIRA: That’s pretty good.
ROSIE: You’re never going to be able to revive a towel, right?
JACKIE: Not really.
ROSIE: Yeah. Once it’s sort of not plush and soft anymore.
JACKIE: Yeah. People do by adding dryer sheets to them, and I will say absolutely do not put fabric softeners or dryer sheets in with your towels. Of all the things that you wash in the laundry, towels are the one thing that you should absolutely just never go near with that stuff because it affects their absorbency. So if you’re worried about how well the towel does its job, basically all you’re doing with the fabric softener is you’re adding on the same kind of conditioners that are on it when it comes new. You spend all that work to wash them out, to get that feel. You’re just putting on another coating basically to make it soft and it’s an artificial feeling. It will affect performance.
CHRISTINE: Okay, Jackie, this is my favorite segment that we do. We’re going to do a lightning round. I’m going to give you a rat-a-tat-tat list of questions. I don’t want you to overthink it, just answer as quick as you can.
JACKIE: Okay.
CHRISTINE: How often should you wash your bath towels?
JACKIE: Every three days. You should change it every three days. You can throw it in a hamper until you wash it, but every three days.
CHRISTINE: What?
JACKIE: Yep.
CHRISTINE: I know. I feel like people are often shocked by that, but yeah, you got skin that’s coming off on it. It’s a good idea to wash it frequently. Yeah. All right. What do you do if you just have stinky towels? You’ve washed them and they still stink.
JACKIE: Make sure you’re using a good detergent. Don’t use too much of it. Any extras that you add to the laundry can build up on a towel, and then if you have a stinky towel for whatever reason, just throw it back in the wash and also make sure that it is, I say bone dry for things and I understand that that is maddening because I’ve also said we can’t feel wetness, so what are you talking about? But get it as dry as humanly possible because any moisture left on that towel while it sits in storage and hangs out is going to make it stink.
CHRISTINE: And just a quick aside, the right amount of detergent should be probably around two tablespoons for a large load, right?
JACKIE: Yeah.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. Okay, great. All right. How many towels should you have per person in a household?
JACKIE: Okay, I like this question because I just finished working on this piece about linen closets and I talked to a bunch of professional organizers and asked them how many sheets and towels and things you should have, and generally two to four towels per person.
CHRISTINE: That is so many towels.
CAIRA: I have like one and a half.
JACKIE: You want to have enough to rotate them out every three days and basically keep up with your own laundry cadence.
CHRISTINE: What’s the difference between a bath towel and a bath sheet?
JACKIE: Bath sheets are just bigger, so if you’re taller and you need more height when you wrap it around your body, or if you’re larger and you need more width to cover your body, bath sheets are just bigger.
CHRISTINE: Okay, that’s great. So what is the deal with a beach towel?
JACKIE: Beach towels are bigger, first of all. They’re significantly bigger because you’re also using them as a blanket to lie on, and they are generally a shorter terry, and that is to make them lighter to carry, throw in a bag, fold up smaller, and the idea is they’ll dry faster.
CHRISTINE: Okay. How do I tell when it’s time to replace my towels?
JACKIE: I would say when they start fraying, if you notice that the edging is coming undone and you’re seeing threads everywhere, if the surface is pilling a lot and you’re picking off little bits of fluff, if the color is really gone or if you just don’t feel like they’re feeling as good as they used to, but physical signs that they’re falling apart are unraveling.
CHRISTINE: Okay. So for dead towels, you mentioned you like to use yours in your chicken coop.
JACKIE: Yes.
CHRISTINE: But for the regular people amongst us who don’t have chicken coops, what do you recommend doing with old towels?
JACKIE: Reach out to animal shelters. If they’re in bad shape, I wouldn’t donate them for other humans to use, but animal shelters, they need so many supplies, blankets, all that kind of stuff. And so towels are great. Call a vet’s office, call an animal shelter, see if they can use them.
CAIRA: Before we wrap, we ask all of our guests one last question. What’s the last thing you bought that you’ve really loved?
JACKIE: I think the best thing that I bought for anybody for Christmas is, and this might even be in one of our gift guides, this is how I heard about the company at least. We went to Japan last year for spring break and had this amazing trip, and so for my husband for Christmas, I bought him from Sugoi Mart. I think that’s how you say it. I bought him a 120 piece bag of Japanese KitKats. He is living his candy dreams with that bag of KitKats. That has been a highlight of our January, of my January is hearing him talk about how much he’s enjoying all those KitKats.
ROSIE: I have that bag.
CAIRA: Oh, you do?
ROSIE: Yeah, I do.
CAIRA: Is it good?
ROSIE: And I now have to hide it from my family.
JACKIE: Yeah. I haven’t seen it since I gave it to him. Me and my daughter have not had a single one of those KitKats.
ROSIE: It went over well. Thanks, Jackie.
JACKIE: It went over well.
CAIRA: Thanks, Jackie.
JACKIE: No problem.
ROSIE: Always fun to have you.
ROSIE: Jackie back again with all of the info nuggets and gems.
CAIRA: Just straightened out.
ROSIE: That I never knew about towels or textiles.
CHRISTINE: I feel like… Yeah. Well, I’ve worked with Jackie for years and I feel like I just learned a bunch of stuff I actually didn’t even know. It’s awesome.
ROSIE: What are your takeaways from this one?
CHRISTINE: So, okay, I got to say this whole detail about us humans not having wetness receptors is blowing my mind and I feel like it’s my new cocktail party chatter. By the way, did you know? I feel like this is that kind of thing. It’s like this is just wild. The human body is wild.
CAIRA: Why don’t we have that?
ROSIE: For me, I think I am going to be more open to different textures than I have previously. I’ve always gravitated toward terry, but I’m intrigued by waffle. I also appreciated Jackie’s shorthand to remember what the textures should remind me of. Terry giving that hotel kind of style, waffle giving spa and peshtemal giving that sort of beach.
CAIRA: Yeah, it’s so good. I have a lot of takeaways. First one being I need to get more towels.
CHRISTINE: More than one towel.
CAIRA: It’s like one and a half, Christine. Okay. I have a backup. I just don’t like it that much. Aside from that…
ROSIE: I have a backup that I hate.
CAIRA: I guess I’ll work on that. Also, I need to be washing my towels more than once a week. Apparently, it’s every three days.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. I guess it depends. If you only take three showers a week, then you’re probably fine.
CAIRA: No, I don’t. No. I take like two showers a day with my one crappy towel.
ROSIE: My dude, you need to do that math because you’re going to need more than one extra towel.
CAIRA: Yeah.
ROSIE: We’ll sidebar.
CAIRA: Okay.
ROSIE: That’s it for us. If you want to find out more about Wirecutter’s coverage or if you want to check out any of the products that Jackie recommended today, if you want to find out more information about her reporting on towels, go to nytimes.com/wirecutter or of course, you can find a link in the show notes. And that’s it for us. Thanks you all.
CAIRA: Thanks. Bye.
CHRISTINE: Bye.
Here’s what’s coming up next week on The Wirecutter Show.
Make sure you’re following the show on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss it. The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel, engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pittman. Today’s episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter’s Deputy Publisher and Interim General Manager is Cliff Levy. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief. I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.
ROSIE: And I’m Rosie Guerin.
CHRISTINE: Thanks for listening.
