Why your towels stopped drying you

You dry yourself and you are still wet. The towel moves the water around instead of taking it, and you end up patting at your arms with something that feels soft and does nothing.

The usual conclusion is that the towels are old and it is time to buy more. Sometimes that is true. Much more often the towel is fine and something has been applied to it.

Fabric softener works by leaving a coating behind. The softening agents carry a positive charge, cotton fibre carries a negative one, so they latch on and stay — as a thin, waxy, water-repelling layer. That layer is what makes the fabric feel soft. It is also, exactly, a layer that repels water.

Fabric softener makes towels feel nicer and stop working, and it builds up a little more with every wash.

A towel does not soak up water by being absorbent in some general way. It draws water along the fibres by capillary action, the way a wick draws oil up into a flame. Put a water-repelling film across the fibres and you have not damaged the towel. You have switched off the mechanism.

The one people miss

Here is the part that catches out the people who already know all of the above, and it is the reason this page exists rather than being one sentence.

A dryer sheet is fabric softener. Not a cousin of it, not a milder version — the same class of coating, delivered a different way. The heat of the drum melts it off the sheet and onto whatever is in there with it. Somebody who stopped pouring softener into the machine years ago, and still throws a sheet in every load, has not stopped using fabric softener. They have changed the applicator.

If you have been wondering why cutting out the liquid never fixed anything, that is very likely the answer.

What to do instead

Nothing at all is the first option, and on towels it is the right one. Across the rest of the wash it is genuinely arguable, and the people who have tried both do not agree — that argument is below, with no winner, because what settles it is your water and your weather rather than a principle.

If you want something in the rinse, white vinegar is what people used. It softens, it takes odours out, and it cuts through detergent residue without laying anything down. Three things about it that people got wrong often enough to correct each other:

It has to be plain white vinegar. Malt and balsamic both got suggested; neither is for this. Apple cider vinegar is not a special version either — vinegar is acetic acid and water, and the fancy kinds bring nothing to a wash but a price.

It goes in the fabric-softener dispenser, so it is released in the rinse. It does not go in with the detergent. Detergent is alkaline and vinegar is acidic, and putting them in together mostly cancels both, which is why people try vinegar once, decide it does nothing, and stop.

And it is a small amount, not a bottle. You are adjusting a rinse, not pickling anything.

Wool dryer balls are the other common answer, and here the people who use them do not agree with each other. Some found they cut drying time and keep things separated; others found them no better than nothing. They cost little and last for years, so trying them is cheap, but this page cannot tell you which camp you will end up in. One thing everyone agreed on: do not put oil on them. They live in a hot drum.

Getting it back

If the coating is already there, stopping is not quite enough on its own — it wears off slowly, over many washes.

To take it off faster, people ran the towels through a hot wash with plain dish soap, or a degreaser, and no detergent. It is a grease problem, so it wants the thing that cuts grease. Then a normal wash to clear that out.

While you are at it: too much detergent produces the same stiff, coated feeling all by itself, and most people use more than the machine needs. If you have been fighting stiffness with softener, you may have been treating a detergent problem with a wax.

And check anything technical you own. Sports and outdoor gear that wicks sweat away works on exactly the mechanism the coating blocks, so softener does not merely make a running shirt less good — it turns off the thing you paid for.

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The other things that go quietly right when you stop: the dryer’s lint screen stops developing a film, so the machine breathes properly and loads dry in the time they are supposed to. And there is one less thing to buy.

To be clear about what that is not — that film on the screen has been tested, and it is not a fire risk. It is a drying-time problem and an efficiency problem, and it is worth mentioning only because getting a month of your dryer’s time back for nothing is a decent trade.

Which leaves the towels themselves, which mostly do not need replacing. They need to be allowed to work.