Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Stripes, Prints or Solids?










Walk to your linen closet, or to the cabinets under the sink in the bathroom. Open the door. Pull out a handful of bath towels. Look them over very carefully.




What do you see?




Are your bath towels solids? Are they prints? Or are they striped?




I was looking over at the towel rack in my ensuite and it hit me: so many of our towels have stripes. Depending on how the towel is hung, they can be either vertical or horizontal stripes.


Whereas vertical stripes have a thinning effect, horizontal stripes offer the opposite. So why the heck were beach and bath towels designed to be wrapped around one's body in such a way that the stripes are horizontal?!




Women wrap themselves in their horizontal striped towel, then drop the towel to get on the scale and check their weight. "Yay, I dropped those horizontal stripes and three pounds just fell away with them!"


Did the inventor of terry-cloth or plush velour or basic cotton towels decide that white towels were bland and boring, that color needed to be added, that stripes needed to be added to help enhance one's look, that the pruning of one's skin following a lengthy shower or bath just didn't cut it.


Do take a survey and let me know: are the majority of your bath towels striped?