I hate to break it to you, but your bath towel is dirty – really dirty. The moment you use it, it becomes a breeding ground of bacteria; fungi; dead skin cells; salivary, anal and urinary secretions; and many other germs lingering in your bathroom that may have hopped onto your towel – including droplets from your toilet.
While most of these microbes aren't likely to harm you, given that most of them probably came from your own body, they're there, and they're multiplying quickly.
So how many times can you use your towel before before concentrations of your own flora get so out of hand that you need to wash it? "If you can dry it completely, no more than three times max," Philip Tierno, a microbiologist and pathologist at the New York University School of Medicine, told Tech Insider.
And this is assuming that you're hanging it somewhere dry so that it can completely air out. "A damp towel is growing," Tierno said. "If there is odour coming from the towel, wherever there is odour, there are microbes growing so it should be washed."
Towels serve as ideal breading grounds for germs because they contain many of the requirements for microbial life: water, warm temperatures, oxygen, food, and a neutral pH. The human body supplies these ideal living conditions, which is why our entire body is covered in them inside and out.
When you wick moisture from your body, the microbes and other secretions such as cellular debris that live on the surface of your body get deposited onto your towel. Your cellular debris and other deposits from the air serve as food for the microbes, and the moisture supplies water at a neutral pH.
It's hard to say whether the microbes growing on your towel are harmful, Tierno said, since most germs in our households aren't dangerous.
But if you share your towel with others, you could potentially come into contact with organisms that your body isn't used to dealing with – such as Staphylococcus aureus, Tierno said, "which may give rise to a boil, or a pimple, or an infection."
"The idea is to be prudent and to be aware," Tierno said. Mostly, aware that your towel is disgusting. And you're probably not washing it enough.
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
More from Business Insider:
- Delta's futuristic new airport screen can show personalized flight info to multiple people at once — here's how it works
- The FBI and MI5 gave an unprecedented joint warning on threats from China, and said the UK disrupted a cyberattack on 'critical' aerospace firms
- Elon Musk's famous family includes a model, several millionaire entrepreneurs, and secret twins. Here are the members of the Musk family tree.
- Kremlin takes aim at Boris Johnson after he is forced out, saying he 'really doesn't like Russia, and we don't like him either'
- 'Big Short' investor Michael Burry pokes fun at GameStop's stock split — and questions whether Elon Musk will triumph in space or crash and burn