Utopia Kitchen Towels Are Super Cheap, Highly Absorbent, and Surprisingly Chic
Our kitchen towel testers have given the Utopia bar mops low marks for being “not that attractive” compared with other kitchen towels, and I agree that they can look disproportionately stumpy when slung over a towel rack or through a drawer handle — but I’ve come up with a few styling hacks that can elevate their look.
My favorite technique is to roll (rather than fold) several of them and display them together in a basket that fits in a handy space close to the sink. (A wooden wine crate or similar container also works.)
For my two-bathroom home, I keep some in a decorative storage bin that sits atop a toilet tank, and I put others in a standing storage unit. When I have guests over, I put a small wastebasket on the floor nearby to encourage folks to use a fresh hand towel on a bathroom visit and then toss it into the wastebasket below.
If you’ve ever reached for a bathroom’s lone hand towel and found it damp thanks to the person who used it previously, you can imagine how much nicer it is to use a fresh one every time—especially in a house full of people.
After more than a year of using the Utopia bar mops, I’ve found that I can easily keep them looking bright by washing them with other whites in warm or hot water and adding OxiClean or white vinegar to the cycle. The best part is that when they do start to get dingy, I feel no remorse about demoting them to rag duty (and, one day, to my textile recycling heap).
At less than $2 a pop, they’re an amazingly bargain-priced way to add a little bougie to your bathroom.
This article was edited by Alexander Aciman and Annemarie Conte.
