Is Cleaning Your Shower with a Bath Towel Truly Effective?

Cleaning the bathroom doesn’t top anyone’s list of favorite chores. To minimize the amount of time spent on the task, a seemingly-endless list of bathroom cleaning hacks are out there, using everything from vodka to baby oil to keep the grime at bay.

One of the latest tricks involves wiping down the shower with the same bath towel you use to dry yourself off every day (yes, you heard that right). According to advocates of this effortless method, tending to the shower every day can save you time and energy when it comes to the deep bathroom clean. But is it too good to be true? Here’s what an expert has to say about the anti-soap scum cleaning tip.

You may have noticed a translucent layer of film on your bathroom tiles or shower walls that just won’t rinse away on its own. Often called soap scum, it’s a combination of soap (or other bath products), dirt, and minerals found in hard water. Similar to limescale, the harder your water (aka the more minerals found in your water) the quicker the mixture builds up.

The bath towel trick is meant to help erase soap scum without doing any hard scrubbing—you simply wipe the walls and tiles down after every shower you take. But as it turns out, this hack can end up being problematic over time.

Allie Echeverria, a modern home economics expert and founder of the Eaton Broshan Method, says that the hack does keep your shower looking clean in the short term. Unfortunately, though, it might mean spending more time doing laundry, using more detergent, and maybe even paying higher energy bills. Instead of using your bath towel, she suggests hanging a microfiber towel from a suctioned hook in your shower.

“That way you can wipe down the surfaces and use your bath towel more than once,” Echeverria says. “You should change your bath towel after every three uses if you’re not using it to clean the tub and tiles."

And if you need another reason to stay away from this shower cleaning hack, you might want to think about what that towel is picking up. Even if you can’t see it, your shower walls could collect mold or mildew, and that shower scum might have developed bacteria of its own.

Therefore, wiping down the shower walls makes your towel a potential breeding ground for all kinds of unwanted germs—not something you want to wipe your face with after your next bath. If you use the towel to wipe off your body after trying out the hack, you could end up sick or dirtier than you were before the shower.

Luckily, there are so many quick and effective ways besides the bath towel method to keep your shower clean. Instead of a microfiber towel, you can use a squeegee to effectively clean off tiles and the shower door—though this tool works better for shower stalls and tile walls than it does for bathtubs. 

Echeverria also recommends wiping down surfaces with a spray cleaner after every shower if you’re going the daily maintenance route to ensure you kill any bacteria that’s present. And if the soap scum is looking really bad, you can use the cleaner with a squeegee and remove the excess with a microfiber towel.

With a combination of these daily tricks, you should be able to shave some time off your regular routine and learn to love keeping your shower clean.