Vintage Bath Towel, Distinctive Smell

August 4, 2023 7:01 AM

In the 1960s there was one weird towel in the family: It was bath-towel sized, terry (looped), very scritchy, natural light brown color. (Perhaps a decades-older towel, in grandmother's household.) What made it distinctive for young me was the smell. Not old or mildewed stank, more a strong smell intrinsic to the fiber. Haven't met that flavor since. The towel was rough, could have been a sauna-intended towel. Used for beach but seemed more intended for skin scruffing. Flax or linen, or some other treated cotton-adjacent textile? Possibly from Europe.
posted by xaryts to Home & Garden (7 answers total)

Best answer: Not old or mildewed stank, more a strong smell intrinsic to the fiber. Haven't met that flavor since.

How often have you encountered beach towels that have spent enough time out in the sun to make the cotton start to lose flexibility? I ask because, in my experience, frequently-salty cotton towels that have had a lot of sun exposure do get wonderfully skritchy and do have a completely distinctive fabric scent.

I have never exposed any of my towels to either in-wash fabric softeners or dryer sheets because I have a perfume allergy and I'm too cheap to run a dryer; I wash my towels with a low-scent liquid laundry detergent and line dry them. I can tell them apart by scent even when they're perfectly fresh and clean, and the older they are, the more towelly they smell.

That said, linen beach towels are absolutely a thing. I don't have one but I would not be at all surprised to find that it smells different from cotton.

Linen is flax, for what that's worth.
posted by flabdablet at 7:26 AM on August 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

...silk? That doesn't make any sense, but silk is the only fiber I can think of that has a distinctive (wonderful) smell. It couldn't be silk; silk doesn't like to be repeatedly wetted and dried and wrenched around, so it probably would've disintegrated under normal towel-use/towel-care long before it became vintage. Wait, maybe wool? Do they make towels out of wool? Sometimes wool hangs on to its lovely lanolin smell. But why would they make a towel out of wool? They wouldn't. Wool also doesn't make any sense. Dang. I hope somebody figures this out!
posted by Don Pepino at 8:02 AM on August 4, 2023

Best answer: Hemp fiber can have a grassy/hay/barnyard odor and it's cultivated in some of the same regions as flax in Europe.
posted by fountainofdoubt at 8:17 AM on August 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

Do you remember if your grandmother used a clothesline?

When I was young, we had a washer but no drier. All clothing & linens were air dried on lines in the backyard. (just washed with fabric detergent / no softener)

Our cotton terry towels (and jeans!) would dry very stiff - towels would remain a bit scratchy for a few uses - becoming soft right around the time to rewash them.

Everything would smell super fresh - unmatched by today's softeners / fabric sheets.
We moved to a house with a drier and life changed.
posted by gardenkatz at 10:03 AM on August 4, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks for answers; everything was line dried (or dried on a hanging rack indoors over the stairs), so ALL the linens were scritchy but this towel was a special kind of meant-to-be-sandpapery. Will look around for early-midcentury hemp terrycloth for the indelible smell of memory.
posted by xaryts at 10:20 AM on August 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Could have been burlap or jute, too.
posted by ApathyGirl at 10:33 AM on August 4, 2023

I have some linen bath towels that I bought on-line from Rawganique, and they fit your description exactly. A bit pricey, but they have held up very well for several years. If you prefer towels that are a bit scratchy, they're a delight to use.
posted by Corvid at 6:06 PM on August 4, 2023 [1 favorite]