‘I had to wash them 3-4 times’: Woman buys new towels from Amazon. Then she throws them in the dryer
There’s nothing better than a fresh, warm towel, right out of the dryer—so long as that warmth doesn’t turn into an electrical fire.
Taunya Cullumber (@t.cucumber) posted a video showing the insane lint build-up she found after washing her new towels on Jan. 15, 2025. As of publication, the video has over 60,000 views on TikTok.
A dryer dilemma
“This is what happens when you buy towels off of Amazon,” Cullumber begins. “This thing has been going for over an hour and hasn’t shut off.” She flips the camera as she speaks, revealing and pointing at her dryer full of Amazon towels. “And so I’m wondering, ‘Why, what’s going on?’”
“Look,” Cullumber states ominously, leaning down to the dryer and shimmying the lint trap out of it. When she finally pulls it out, the trap is stuffed with thick, fluffy, white lint.
“What the actual [expletive],” she asks, laughing as she rotates the lint trap in front of the camera. In the process, one thick corner of the lint sheet peels up. “That’s like a whole sheep!”
The video cuts to Cullumber combing through her sheets as she tries to figure out how her lint trap ended up so full. “Now I’m wondering if there’s a hole in the towels or something,” she theorizes. “‘Cause that was a lot, these are brand new—brand new towels.”
“Have you guys ever experienced this?” Cullumber asks as she wraps up her video. The camera cuts to her holding up the anomalous lint sheet next to her face. “This is insane,” she concludes.
Detractors discuss dryer discourse
“How many you got in there?” one commenter asked. “First wash of any new towels will shed a lot. No matter where they came from.”
“What’s insane is you trying to dry 90 pounds of towels at once,” another commenter critiqued. “You would get a normal amount if you did a typical six towel load.”
“I know, it looks like an insane amount of towels, but it’s really not that much,” Cullumber insisted in a response video. In the video, she cuts to footage of the load she was drying, which included two towel sheets, two regular sized towels, four washcloths, and two hand towels.
“So probably, when you put it all together, it’s like, six towels?” she guesses. “Honestly, I consider that a typical towel load.” She concedes that these towels in particular were extra soft, and had never been washed before, which might have contributed to the problem she presented in her original video.
“That’s probably why the lint thing was insane,” she states. “Could use that thing for my emergency preparedness kit,” she jokes, cutting to footage of the full lint sheet again. “It could make about ten campfires—what do you think?”
So, is this just a thing with new towels?
Other commenters understood Cullumber’s issue, and some were even in the same boat as her.
“Most all new towels shed like that,” a commenter reassured Cullumber. “Always watch your lint filter the first few times through the dryer.”
“Ok I thought it was just me,” a user said, followed by three laughing-crying emojis. “I had to wash them three to four times before it stopped doing that.”
“Had this happen with some beach towels I bought off Amazon,” agreed a different user. “As much fuzz as there was a towel.”
The issue wasn’t just with towels, though.
“The sheets I bought off Amazon did the same thing,” someone else added.
@t.cucumber Have you seen this?? #towels #homegoods #amazon #amazonfinds
What should you do with new towels?
If this lint situation is such a common problem in new towels, what can you do to prevent it? Is there a specific way new towels should be treated?
“You may not have known that your new bath towel has a 'break in' period before it reaches maximum softness and absorbency,” writes Melanie Viaje in an article for Connecticut-based bed and bath store, Fine Linen and Bath. “In fact, it can take as many as three full wash cycles for your bath towel to feel great and absorb water the way it was designed to.”
Viaje recommends washing new towels multiple times, but in different ways.
In the first round, she encourages readers to wash their towels in a warm, regular cycle using white vinegar instead of detergent. For the second round, she says to use a half cup of baking soda. Lastly, she tells readers to dry their towels according to the directions on the tag, but to avoid using dryer sheets or fabric softeners.
The Daily Dot reached out to Cullumber via TikTok and Instagram direct message, and Amazon via email.
Internet culture is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here. You’ll get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
Sign up to receive the Daily Dot’s Internet Insider newsletter for urgent news from the frontline of online.
The post ‘I had to wash them 3-4 times’: Woman buys new towels from Amazon. Then she throws them in the dryer appeared first on The Daily Dot.