The towel that did you dirty
I have towel problems. On the one hand, there are some bath towels in the guest room that have lasted 9 years and counting. They show no sign of wear. They don’t smell weird. They still work. They were my main towels from 2014 until 2017. Now they’re used about a third of the time.
On the other hand, the towels that I use every day are rapidly failing. Threads everywhere, rough texture, weird smell I can’t get out, and they are shrinking – to the point where a bath sheet is now 3” shorter on one side, and a washcloth is about the size of a small dessert plate. I bought them almost exactly two years ago.
My guest room towels were bought from one place, and my personal towels from another. I have done nothing else to them, maintenance-wise.
How long do you expect a towel to last? Five years? Seven? One doesn’t think much about it. This article says 2 to 5, so my current sad towels feel like they’re dying pretty quickly.
To be clear, the problem is not that the towels are dying. It’s that they are dying prematurely. They didn’t last. I should be tossing these in 2026 and never writing text about it. This matters for several reasons:
- Buying towels twice as often is expensive. It’s cheaper to buy an expensive towel that will last.
- I don’t want to have to think about my towels. I should be spending a fraction of one brain cell about my towels. I should experience pleasure using them, because I use them every day. That’s it.
- Reviews are untrustworthy at the timeframes I’m thinking. Most people post a review shortly after the first few uses, not after 5 or 10 years. Many of the stores I buy from don’t even have review sections at all. Not even Reddit can help here in many cases.
- Insert eco-hippie argument here. We didn’t ask Gaia, etc etc etc.
For situations like these, I maintain a list, one I will take to my grave, of brands that didn’t do me well. This text is not about the towel, this text is about the list. It makes no sense to share the list because it is entirely subjective to my own experience, and businesses can change. You may love this brand’s towels. I don’t. That’s fine. They’re not for me.
The list is useful because I forget stuff, and because sometimes brands woo me with the same marketing in the same ways. I always need a reminder.
In theory, a brand can be removed from the list. If the brand shows a deep stated commitment to durability, or releases a new product line with a similar commitment to durability, I’ll ping friends and see if it’s worth trying.
In practice, though, this has never actually happened. Businesses tell you a lot about who they are based on how fast their stuff becomes obsolete. There is a structural economic incentive for something to break quickly. This causes a deep antagonism between business & consumer, one I don’t agree with ethically.
Applied here, you should not get hooked on towel purchases because buying from a cool DTC millennial brand makes you feel good. You should buy a towel once every five years and maintain it well. You should buy as little as possible, and you should get as little dopamine as possible when you do buy something. For everyone else, there’s the list, which is there to protect you.