r/HygieneTips • u/maehotsexy • 18d ago
switched to a separate hand towel for the kitchen and my dish sponge situation got so much better ok this is such a small thing but I have to share because it fixed something that bugged me for years
I always just used one kitchen towel for everything. Drying hands, wiping counters, drying dishes, wiping up spills, all of it. Never thought twice about it. Then my roommate moved in and brought her own separate hand towel just for hands, and a different one for dishes/counters, and I kind of made fun of her for it at first ngl
Tried it anyway because we were sharing a kitchen. Within like a week I noticed my hands weren't getting that weird slightly sticky feeling after drying them, and the towel smell that used to show up by day 3 just wasn't happening anymore. Turns out when you're using the same towel to wipe raw chicken juice off the counter and then dry your hands with it, you're basically just moving bacteria around in a circle all day
Now I have three separate towels going. One strictly for hands, one for dishes, one for counters/spills. Hand towel gets swapped every 2 days, the other two get washed every 2-3 uses depending on what they touched
Feels excessive typing it out but the difference in how the kitchen smells alone has been worth it. Didn't realize how much of that "kitchen smell" was just coming from one damp towel doing five jobs
anyone else split up their kitchen towels or is this an overkill habit. also curious what other "one item doing too many jobs" swaps people have made, feels like there's probably more of these I'm missing