Yes, my friends and colleagues, towels. Because despite the seeming irrelevance of such a thing, a compact travel towel is one of the best ways to cut down on bulky items so you can travel with just a minimum of gear. If you’re looking to shrink things down and travel light, travel towels are an absolute must, because:
Regular towels are gigantic, plush monstrosities that rapidly fill up what little space you might have to work with. They’re also made of every traveler’s arch-nemesis fabric: 100% cotton. It’ll work fine, until you have to wash and dry it. Then it’ll stay wet forever, and sooner or later you’ll stuff it into a pack and it’ll smell atrocious once it comes out.
Travel towels, on the other hand, are super-thin and fast-drying, so they’ll take up very little space, and dry out in just a few hours. Even if they’re totally soaked, you can usually leave them out overnight, and they’ll be ready to go by morning. At $20 each, they’re a backpacker’s best friend. You can use them as a bath towel, beach towel, clothes-wringer, or even a blanket.
The problem, however, is that travel towels are usually made of polyester, or some other form of synthetic material. This is great for fast drying times, but terrible for odor resistance. And you know what causes that odor? Bacterial waste products. That’s right, kids! That horrible smell is bacteria poop. And what happens when you’re stuck with a towel that smells a little “off?” You’re smearing it all over yourself. Gross!
So what’s the best travel towel?
Linen.
That’s right. Something a million years old that went out of style when cotton took over the world is going to be the best travel towel you can possibly get. It’s going to be a little pricy (maybe $30 for a bath towel size), but linen has a number of properties that make it ideal for this sort of job.
First of all, it’s highly absorbent. If you’ve ever tried to dry yourself off with polyester, it just…doesn’t…quite…work. That’s because polyester pushes water away. Linen, on the other hand, soaks it right up.
And what really surprised me was that it dries fast. In fact it dries so quickly that it nearly compares to polyester in side-by-side tests, which was the only point of using polyester in the first place.
But it vastly outperforms synthetic fabrics when it comes to odor resistance. Linen is naturally anti-microbial, which means bacteria have a hard time multiplying on its surface. No bacteria = no smell. I used one of these over the course of a month, and never detected even a hint of odor.
Polyester, on the other hand, usually starts smelling weird after just two or three uses…especially if you have to stuff it into a bag before it had a chance to dry out completely. If you’ve ever pulled one of those smelly towels out of a pack after a long day, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
And once you switch to linen, you will never go back.
I have a few of them. Here’s what they look like:
The waffle weave on the left is softer, but bulkier. The one on the right is scratchier (though it softens up over time), but somewhat more compact. Both work just fine, so take your pick.
They’re quite similar in terms of size and weight to a typical travel towel found in camping stores; maybe a little heavier, though it’ll be a matter of just a few extra ounces. They’re about the size of a t-shirt once they’re all rolled up.
Seriously…this is the way to go. You’ll never go back. I will bet you a beer.
Okay, where do I get one?!
The first one I got was from Outlier (one of the few companies combining fashionable and functional clothing, which is the only way clothes should ever be made), who sent me a free one and I’ve been salivating over it ever since. Sadly, they don’t seem to make them anymore…(update: they’ve just restocked them!)
Luckily for you, they’re all over the place. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and obviously Google. You need to be clever with the search terms though, because “linen” has become a slang term for “sheet” or “towel” or “blanket” or just about any large piece of fabric that belongs in a home. This makes it kind of messy to look up “linen towel” because you’ll find results like “100% cotton bed linens” or other garbage like that. It really annoys me that we’re using the wrong word for something, kind of like how we occasionally use the word “China” for plates, which is ridiculous.
So what you’ll have to do is correctly plug in the exact-match search term, by typing the quotation marks in the proper location, where it’ll–
No. You know what? I’ll just do it for you.
Search for linen towels on:
Those’ll take you to a search specifically for “100% linen” bath towel, with the quotation marks around 100% linen to make it an exact-match search term, so it won’t, for example, show you a towel made of 100% cotton that also happens to have the word linen somewhere on the same page. Hopefully, anyway.
Once you’re there, you can experiment with other search terms, such as bath sheet, which is bigger, and therefore ideal for using as a beach towel or blanket. You can also type the word waffle into the search boxes to get that super-soft waffle weave type shown above. For whatever reason, Etsy seems to be the place to go to find the waffle-weave style, though I also found several on eBay.
You can also just order a couple yards of linen and sew up the edges yourself.
By the way, they make really great kitchen towels. Since they dry faster and resist odor better than cotton, they’re less likely to get sopping wet and smelly over the course of cooking dinner and washing your hands a million times. Obviously there’s a limit to how quickly they can dry out, but it’s noticeably better. They’ll probably last longer, too.
They also work just fine as regular bath towels at home, but I wouldn’t really recommend spending the extra money to replace your old cotton towels, because cotton towels usually have 24 hours to dry before you take your next shower, so drying time isn’t really a big deal…but, on the other hand, the thinner fabric takes up a lot less space in the washing machine, so you can wash more at the same time and save on quarters or electricity costs. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but they’re going to be especially useful for travel, camping, or going to the gym, or something like that.
As for alternatives: I’ve heard that sarongs work nicely, since they’re very thin, and usually made of rayon, which is highly absorbent and would dry faster than cotton…but they’re usually made with the intention of being wrapped around a woman’s body, so they’re not necessarily towel-sized or towel-shaped…and although linen isn’t the absolute lightest travel towel you can get (I think the MSR Packtowl Ultralite is the winner in that regard), you could just use a smaller size.
Well, that’s about all I have to say about them. I’m officially convinced: Linen makes the best travel towel you can get. Now that I’ve found them readily available on eBay and Etsy in all sorts of sizes and colors, and at decent prices, I’m officially upgrading this suggestion from “yeah, you’d probably like it” to “just get it, because it’s objectively superior to any conceivable alternative.”
Happy camping/traveling/showering!
Here is where I have bought 100% linen at a bargain price. http://www.fabrics-store.com/ You really don’t need to hem the linen. It has 2 clean woven sides (selvedges) and the other two sides can be fringed a half inch to an inch pretty simply. Their linen is mostly 60 inches wide, so 2 yards would make a generous bathsheet plus you could cut some smaller pieces off to use for washcloths or hand towels. Linen also works great as a sheet or light blanket that is surprisingly warm if you can cover it with something. It can also be used as a sarong skirt or dress without having to put a stitch in the fabric. Every day they put something on sale. The linen comes in all weights. A medium or light weight linen would work well for this purpose. I will be using linen in my lightweight pack for sure. The more you wash linen, the softer it gets.
Thanks for the suggestions. Buying the fabric by the yard is a pretty easy way to do it, since it’s basically towel-shaped already.
Thank you so much for telling us about linen towels. I just bought some linen today from the shop to sew up as towels for travel. So glad to be able to put it in the backpack since it’s so light.
I soaked the fabric when I got home, and it dried so fast even without wringing. Quite impressed, actually!
I love them. I’m never going back. I might pick up one of the non-waffle kind to see if it packs down a little smaller, but that’s about it. I can’t go back to polyester towels ever again.
So, I can infer from all the positive comments that a linen shirt or pants would also be equally odor resistant. I
‘d like to ditch the all-wool wardrobe for travel clothing as the options for fashionable clothing are so limited, and wool is generally too hot in the tropics despite what some say about it’s ability to regulate temperature better. Wool is also much more expensive, with merino wool Tshirts and underwear running over $40, and a dress shirt $130.
What I have read about clothing in the tropics is that linen is a good choice, especially the more open weaves allowing greater airflow.
Has anyone chosen linen over wool for their travel clothing?
Everyone who uses linen loves it for summer use. I picked up a linen collared shirt recently, although it hasn’t been hot enough to see how it works yet. What annoys me is that it’s always wrinkly, which is part of the appeal, but then I don’t know why there are so few plaid options out there, because wrinkled plaid is barely visibly different from ironed plaid. Argh.
Here’s what I found last night…
http://www.cubavera.com/100%25-linen-front-tuck-gingham/lslook5.html
I’m a huge fan of gingham, as it’s a classic design that hides dirt, stains, and wrinkles better than solid colors. It pairs well with a classic navy blazer and charcoal suit for dressing up. My one go-to travel shirt for the last year or so has been an Icebreaker wool gingham shirt. But it is a bit warm down here in the Florida heat. So I searched or linen men’s dress shirts and found this option in several colors.
This site has many linen items for men, all at 40% off for fathers day!
Yeah, gingham is essentially plaid’s little brother, and it’ll work just as well for wrinkles. I wish more people would make linen/polyester blends, though. Even just a bit of polyester seems to eliminate wrinkles altogether.
I dunno man, linen just feels gnarly on my face. You probably can somehow soften it but why bother if you can just get microfiber towel? Real soft, quickly absorbs water, fast and easy to dry.
Linen gets a little softer every time you wash it. Every time I’ve used a microfiber towel, it mostly just pushes water around, and starts smelling terrible, so I much prefer the linen. The waffle-weave options are much softer, though.
Just curious to see if you tried any of the turkish towels and how they stack up to linen towels?
Cotton is usually a finer fiber, so it’s possible to weave it into a thinner fabric, so it can still dry pretty quickly. But just with the comparison I’ve done with cotton kitchen towels and linen kitchen towels, of equal size and thickness, the slow drying and eventual weird smell are vastly improved with linen. Turkish towels are cheaper though, so they’re not a bad choice.
I have never used a linen towel, but I have 5 Turkish towels. I purchased one and was so impressed I purchased one for every family member. They are great for the water parks, the beach, camping etc. I have used them as a sarong, a scarf, you name it. They dry fast and pack up small. They were less than $12 each on amazon and free shipping.
> “just get it, because it’s objectively superior to any conceivable alternative.”
What do you think about swim towels?
Sorry, I mean a swimmer’s towel. Something like this: http://amzn.to/2ccAy5t
As far as I can tell, those are identical to travel towels. The only possible advantage they’d have for swimming is that if a linen towel is splashed, it’ll soak up more moisture and take longer to dry than a polyester one that’ll shed a bit before it soaks deeper into the fibers, so it’ll have less that needs to dry out. But if you don’t splash, and you sort of shake off after you leave the pool to dry off, you can solve that pretty easily.
We have a new travel towel that bridges the gap. Check out Nomadix towels.
Interesting post, could you give us an idea of the weight of linen towels for a given size ? This is one of the most important things when choosing travel towels and you didn’t mention it, so it’s hard to make a decision without knowing that.
The Outlier towel is 10 ounces. It’s quite generously sized, so I think one of the smaller ones on Etsy would be a little better if you’re using it just as a towel, rather than a beach towel or a blanket.
What size of linen towel do you think would work best for a travel towel given their absorbency? I’ve never used a linen towel so it’s hard for me to eyeball.
I’m wondering if 13 by 20-Inch would be enough to dry one person off after showering. Or I should go for the 18 by 28-Inch one instead. I’m trying to get as small as possible for packability yet being practical still.
I think if you have short hair, the small one will work. You can also kind of wipe yourself off like a windshield wiper with your hands before drying. You might not be perfectly dry with a towel that small, but it’s usually fine. But if you want a good drying-off or if you have long hair, the 18×28 is probably a better idea.
Makes sense. I made the mistake of buying a microfibre towel from a travel store for $35, only to realize you can buy similar towels at dollar stores. I even googled it to see what the microfibre materials are and it’s not even stated in the product description.
Yeah, they’re all kind of the same, and although they do their job, I think linen just does it better.