Bathroom towels. Aibu?

[Lou780]

How does everyone handle bathroom towels? Does everyone in family have their own towel? Or do you all share whatever towels are in the bathroom?

Towel sharers, strip washers...
No wonder the world is such a mess.

Only have hand towels in the bathroom washed every three days!! In every bedroom bath towels which are kept on radiator towel rails one for every person that are washed bout every five days.

It is minging to share bath towels with other people.

Gerbs is financed by Coverall. Perhaps you should post/link to scientific evidence not tied to someone who gets paid to spruik cleaning stuff and who has no vested interest.

We have a full set of monogrammed towels each, dahhhhhling.

Gerbs is financed by Coverall. Perhaps you should post/link to scientific evidence not tied to someone who gets paid to spruik cleaning stuff and who has no vested interest.

Nevertheless it does sound pretty unpleasant to share a used towel with other family members. Presumably people who do so get washed or showered at the beginning of the day so it's not even going to have time to dry between uses. Minging sounds right to me.

Ahh MN is so good at letting me know how disgusting I am in ways I'd never realized before

We each have our own towel bales by colour . Bath towels washed twice a week and face towels and flannels daily .

Clean towels in airing cupboard. Every one helps themselves. Me and partner share as we put towels on radiator to dry. The kids tend to leave wet towels in a heap on the floor so I don't use those! All washed once a week.

@HoppingPavlova

NHS website okay for you? It is presumably keen on the health of the nation!

"High risk" items include shared towels.

www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/infections/can-clothes-and-towels-spread-germs/

@Mygoodlygodlingtons

From the link;
There are 3 main ways that germs are spread by clothes and towels:
*when towels or bedlinen are used by more than 1 person germs can spread between them
*when someone handles dirty laundry they can spread germs onto their hands
*when clothes are washed, germs can spread between items in the process of being washed

So according to the NHS info above, no one should ever share a bed with a kid who comes and hops in during the night (refer point 1- sharing of bed linen). In fact, sharing with a DH/significant other is also minging according to the above. Separate beds for every household member.

Refer point 2 - While there may be someone who does this, how common is scrubbing of hands or indeed washing of hands after people have loaded the dirties into the washing machine. Minging if not apparently, yet I really doubt it’s a widespread occurrence.

Last point, how many people seperate everyone’s clothes in the machine lest they ‘contaminate’ each other. Again, I don’t doubt there is someone out there but I would pay bets it’s not routine. Minging if you don’t! Common sense says if someone in the household has gastro, some other contagious nasty or a skin condition then they get their own towel, no one wants to share their sheets with them and their clothes will be washed separately possibly in a special wash and on high temp.

The reality though is that for a bunch of healthy people with no skin conditions there is no issue with partners sharing a bed, kids jumping into parents beds in the middle of the night, not scrubbing your hands after loading a washing machine and bunging everyone’s routine clothes in the wash together (and no I’m not talking about clothes that have poo, vomit, caked on mud or lambing residue - just everyday clothes people wear to school and work etc). If you are going to single the towels out you need to address the other stuff as well. While ideal, it’s just not done in the real world and as I said hospitals are not and have never been swamped with share towel emergencies unless I have been living in a black hole for decades and you can provide information otherwise?

Luckily, we can all do our own thing! There are no laundry police. (But if a spot opens up, count me in.)

Hopping
I doubt it would be an emergency but plenty of infected wounds, molluscum,worms,boils,impetigo etc
Drying your "clean " self on a towel some else has just dried their arse with is just rank and completely lacking in common sense and basic hygiene.
Unless you rub yourself dry with your family members dirty pants the other stuff is just being silly to try and make a point.

Gosh, grimacing at at the people who share towels for days on end and justify it by saying that the towels must still be clean as the bodies/hands they dried are clean. If your kids are anything like mine, the level of cleanliness even after a shower/bath will not be impressive.

Everyone has their own towel in this house, washed every two days at 60 degrees (because you need a temperature of at least 55 degrees to kill germs). Face clothes washed after every use, go in with towels. Hand towel for communal use but washed every day (or quicker if looking dirty).

I wash my towel every day after shower, but just use a hand towel rather than bath towel to reduce washing - I know it probably doesn't need washed each day but it is always very damp because I wash my hair almost every day too and having a fresh towel every day is my own little luxury. (And I go out of my way to be environmentally friendly in other ways.)

And I wash my hands after putting laundry in the machine too!

Sharing towels is gross. Imagine using one that someone else has used to dry their bum and genitals - even when clean they contain bacteria which can be pathogenic if they travel to another area.

Bluerussian yes but these people you are sharing with aren't strangers

We all have our own, and our own peg on the inside of the door of the cupboard where the hot water tank and boiler are so it's nice and warm for them to dry.

Its drying yourself on a towel covered with someone elses skin bacteria and skin cells plus the boys do the vigorous bum/ balls drying

Well when you put it like that...

We are still quite gross though and this will now stick in my head but not enough to change anything. I am disgusting by MN standards anyway, we only change bedsheets once a week, have a toilet brush, kids bath every couple of days instead of every day, etc etc. Really, we should all be struck down with some virus that affects dirty dirty people or something

All have our own. Washed once a week on a particular day. All have our own hooks to assist with this. My parents used to chop and change towels including my own which I detested as a child so I'm really careful we don't use each other's.

Imagine using one that someone else has used to dry their bum and genitals - even when clean they contain bacteria which can be pathogenic if they travel to another area.

It's the same bum and genitals that come into close contact with my own in bed, sometimes very close contact if I am lucky so I cannot say that I find sharing towels "grim" as we already share so much.

All colour coded and seperate, no way i am sharing DH's towels.

Own towels washed fortnightly, shared hand towel washed weekly or change after any visitors (I've a thing about people not properly washing their hands). Visitors get own sheets and towels and those are laundered after departure or weekly.

We have clean folded towels in airing cupboard.
Use one, air in our own rooms to use again or pop in wash basket and get another one next time it's needed.
Once washed and dried I put them back in the cupboard they're all the same too.

We each have our own, different colours.

What does it matter if people are not strangers? They still have bums, minges or balls, and the rest. Think about it, you could have water in your eyes and wipe them with a towel that has dried a bottom.

You just do not share towels, never heard of such a thing before.

My mum was a terrible housekeeper, but we all had our own towels. I think sharing towels is gross (and I'm not particularly fastidious) weird and cheapskate.