Linen or Cotton for a Sauna Towel?

The short version

Cotton terry is a better bath towel. Linen is a better sauna towel. Those are different jobs and the difference is drying time.

What a sauna does to a towel

A sauna is a hot, humid room that your towel then lives in, or near, until the next session. Cotton terry holds a lot of water and gives it up slowly. A terry towel that was damp on Tuesday might still be damp on Wednesday, in a warm room, which is how towels start to smell.

Linen takes up water quickly and releases it quickly. Flax fiber is also stronger wet than dry, which is unusual and is why linen survives decades of laundering.

Why a new linen towel feels wrong

This is the part nobody tells you.

A new linen towel with nothing on it feels stiff and does not seem to absorb. Next to a supermarket cotton towel it feels like a mistake.

Both of those change. Linen softens substantially over the first dozen washes, and its absorbency goes up rather than down as the fibers open. A cotton towel does the reverse: it starts plush and stops drying you properly within a couple of years.

The reason a new cotton towel feels plush is usually a silicone softener applied at the mill. That coating is also why it stops absorbing. We use none of that on our linen, and the cost is that ours feels firmer out of the box.

The thing to never do to either

Do not use fabric softener. It is a silicone coating, it stops the cloth absorbing, and it does not wash back out. Dryer sheets do the same thing. This ruins more towels than anything else.

What we sell, and the stake we have in saying this

We sell a linen bath towel and a pair of linen hand towels, so take the above accordingly.

The honest version of the argument: if you already own cotton towels and they work for you, you do not need to replace them. But if you have ever thought "this towel smells and I only used it twice," you may need this article.