In case you’re busy living your life and not staring at Twitter all day, it’s Towel Week on the internet and at The Inventory. All this talk of towels has had me thinking a lot about my favorite type of towel — yes, I have a favorite towel type and so should you. That towel, my dear, damp friends, is the microfiber hair towel, and it is without a doubt the best kind of towel for you and your ’do.
Some backstory on how me and the microfiber hair towel found each other: I have curly hair that I did not know how to style for many years. (Like, I used to brush it out and walk around looking like a poodle who just rolled around on carpet.) But when I was a tween, I read in Seventeen magazine that people with curly hair should not do things that people with non-curly hair do. Namely, they should not dry their hair by vigorously rubbing a terrycloth towel all over their newly clean head. Instead, the article recommended using a T-shirt or literal paper towels to methodically squeeze the excess water out of the hair, like how you would squeeze water out of a sponge.
And so teenage me, with my unwavering faith in teenage media, started scrunching my sopping wet hair with paper towels, which I would then save, let dry on the bathroom counter, and reuse the next time I washed my hair because I care for the environment. In later years, I would try the T-shirt method, but quickly found that it was actually more of a two, sometimes three T-shirt job. Both of these methods yielded good hair results — my curls really were less frizzy, and thus easier to manage and shinier — but my bathroom was pretty much flooded after each of these hair drying sessions. Then, in college, I noticed that one of my roommates had a microfiber hair towel, so I got a microfiber hair towel. It changed everything.
As prolific cleaning guru Jolie Kerr recently mentioned, microfiber hair towels are way lighter and less fluffy than regular towels, which in turn makes them better for hair that’s on the thinner side, or prone to breakage. But most notably, microfiber is absorbent as hell. Gone were my days of using a forest’s worth of household paper products or half the shirts in my dresser to get excess water out of my hair; one average, hand towel-sized microfiber cloth works just fine, thank you very much.
In terms of which microfiber towel is best, I stan the brand Aquis. Their long hair towel is a great size, and dark grey color is a nice neutral. I’ve also used the Aquis microfiber turban, but it turns out, turbans aren’t great for curly hair. If you’re not concerned about your texture or you’re planning to use a hot tool to style your hair later, though, it gets the job done. I also have a DevaTowel, which I received as a free gift with the purchase of some shampoo and conditioner, and like it just as much as the Aquis, plus it’s slightly less expensive.
And so, if there’s anything you take away from Towel Week 2019, I personally hope it’s that proper towels can not only improve your home, they can also change your hair for the better.