The Guide to Dealing with Towel Odours

Posted on 22/10/2015

Keeping the Towels Fresh and Unsmelly

Towel odours are simply disgusting to deal with, are they not? Just by leaving the towel a few days without drying it will bring out a stench that will stick to your hands like glue every time you touch the towel, let alone use it. Using the wrong laundry soap when washing them will do the same result, as will not hanging them up to dry after taking them out of the laundry machine even though you used the most fragrant fabric softener. This is because towels are not supposed to stay wet, because they create the perfect environment for mould and bacteria, which eventually cause not only the repugnant reek, but eventual diseases as well. And you can’t even wait for home cleaning to come before you deal with them as they get dirtier much faster than your house.

The best way to tackle this is first by trying to prevent the towel from staying wet. After you use a towel for whatever reason, you have to hang it up to dry out somewhere, a dry place with lots of air circulation that will go through the towel and take away the bad smell. The simple hanging of the towel will solve so many of your problems. But that can be challenging when you are dealing with the whole family’s towels. You can’t go after everybody and always check if everybody has hung his or her towel, and most of the time you know that the wet towel is probably flung to the floor, waiting to be picked up by someone else. Maybe you should have them do the carpet cleaning next time to see how fun that is.

If it comes to dealing with the odour, you can’t always send the towel to the laundry machine, because that would mean cleaning towels almost daily, and nobody has this amount of towels. And you can’t always wait for them to dry out as it could take days, especially in the colder seasons. So there are a couple of solutions you can use instead:

•    Baking soda – This is a universal method for dealing with odours. Baking soda is an amazing tool for dealing with odour sources, so you simply have to rub some on the towel’s more problematic spots and it should start working immediately.

•    If you have a dryer, use it. There are some people who propose to throw in a few clean tennis balls along with the wet towels and that somehow softens up the towels as they dry out, probably because of the friction between the balls’ surface and the towel fabric. You can try it out on your own risk, but do remember that the sound of tennis balls inside the dryer is not a pleasant one.

Ultimately, the best way to remove odours from your towels is the laundry machine. And if the towel has been a subject to a certain smell for a while, it is the only tool that will help you. You don’t even have to use detergent or fabric softener, just take them for a spin in a cycle with baking soda or even vinegar as a detergent, and the smells should go away instantly after they dry up. Always use line drying as hanging the towels outside will expose them to better air circulation than any place inside, and especially the dank bathroom.

Towel cleaning is pretty much like house cleaning – you should be able to avoid the odours ever becoming the problem if you always inspect the towels and throw them into the laundry machine the moment you smell any kind of odour emanating from them. Otherwise, cleaning them once every week or two and regular drying is the best method for always keeping them fresh and unsmelly as possible.