Why You Shouldn't Be Washing Your Kitchen Towels With Bath Towels

While it may feel like second nature, laundry can admittedly get a little complicated. With our busy schedules, just getting a load of laundry washed, dried, and folded is a victory. But there's one more simple separation you might want to add to your laundry routine: separating your kitchen towels from your bath towels. We know it's all too easy to throw all your towels together, especially if they're all in the same color family, but doing this is a cleaning mistake that could prove to be a safety issue.

Think about what your kitchen towels are exposed to. They're wiping up surfaces where foods like raw meat have been — essentially, they're entering the laundry basket with a whole lot of bacteria. Bath towels touch our skin and can attract all those bacteria from the kitchen towels if they're in the same load. This is especially risky if the bath towels are damp, because bacteria love damp conditions for growing and multiplying.

If the temperature of the water in your washing machine isn't high enough, it won't kill that bacteria and you could end up drying off post-shower with stubborn food particles that hopped onto our bath towel. No wonder this can even lead to skin problems. Of course, the goal is in fact to kill all bacteria on anything you're washing. But keeping kitchen and bath towels separate is a surefire layer of protection against contamination. If you have the space, add a laundry hamper to your kitchen.

Both kitchen and bath towels need to be washed in hot or very warm water to get fully clean with no remaining bacteria. Water is considered "warm" between 90 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and "hot" between 120 and 140 degrees. You want your washing machine to be set at a minimum of 105 degrees for towels, and it's smart to wash bath towels in water as high as 190 degrees — another reason to separate kitchen and bath towels.

Kitchen and bath towels also differ somewhat in how often they should be washed. Kitchen towels start accumulating bacteria within just a day. So, they need to be cleaned after being exposed to anything not cooked, whenever they feel damp, or simply every few days. Bath towels should be washed after a maximum of three uses.

If doing separate loads of kitchen and bath towels isn't realistic for you time- or cost-wise, you can safely combine them if you keep that water temperature high and use a powerful laundry detergent. As one of vinegar's many handy cleaning uses, a simple splash of white distilled vinegar in your machine's fabric-softener compartment periodically eliminates detergent residue and any lingering odors, so you have fresh, clean, bacteria-free towels.