I have seen met people who use 3 towels. 4 may be uncommon, but not abnormal.

For the last question I welcome you to !SkincareAddiction where’s there’s a lot of helpful people that can help you with that! 😊

Important question: Is this the only situation where you strictly divide clean and unclean?

Why do you feel like you would be less clean? Like peas touching carrots on a plate? You have 1 body.

IMO the different sized towels are all towels and are sized for convenience. If you only wash your hands you don’t want to have to use a blanket to dry them. When you wash your body you don’t want to use a box of tissue sized towels to dry off. It isn’t about contaminating part of your body.

It depends on what you’re wiping off. If it’s for drying yourself after a shower, then I’d just use my big bath towel to dry every part of my body since they should all be clean by that point. I sometimes use an extra towel for my hair since I have long hair and it needs some extra fabric to help dry out.

Run away from any OCD-like compulsions early, if that could be the case. please

I don’t understand the logic behind the idea that it makes you “less clean” to wipe yourself off of excess water literally seconds after cleaning yourself in the shower. Think about it: to legitimately spread germs around with the towel, you’d need either the towel, or the area you’re wiping off, to be unclean in the first place.

My wife likes a separate towel for her hair, but it’s because she has very long and thick hair that’s hard to dry out. Not doing so would mean leaving a trail of water dripping on the ground.

This sounds like it might be an OCD thing, especially given your reasoning. Do you you have other OCD like habits? OCD is relentless once it gets ahold of you, and can have seriously negative effects for both yourself and your loved ones. The earlier you address it, the easier it is to keep it from ruling your life.

No. It’s not normal at all. But you do you. No one is normal.

But I would be more worried about having OCD if you are worried that using separate towels for your hands and face makes you less clean.

Something I learned taking college microbiology was that if you reuse towels for drying off make sure one end (like the end with the tag) is dedicated for your bottom half and the other for the top. That way you don’t accidentally get your genital flora in your eyes/face.

The error is thinking that your own sebum is bad and should be avoided. It’s like hating that you have tears. If you like, dedicate zones of the towel to functions.

That is not normal. You’re just too keen on getting dry very fast

I think there’s a missing detail.

Do you want to use different towels for the different parts of you even right after showering? Or only so that a different one for after shovering, another for your hands for when you just washed hands, and another for the face when you just washed your face?
I don’t think the former is normal, but the latter is. A different one for showring and just washing your hands is good to have I think, and if you have got oily skin then a third one for your face is also completely understandable.

I use 4 towels as well, big one for body, small ones for hair and hands and tiny one for the face. Last one is more like a washcloth and not a full fledged towel.

I just start at the top and work my way down when I’m drying off. That being said if any part of you isn’t clean enough to rub a towel on and then rub that towel on your face you aren’t washing properly.