The Towel on Alone: What Contestants Actually Use

A towel is one of the item catalog's five "clothing-adjacent" categories, alongside soap, toothpaste, dental floss, and razor, personal-care items that have to win a real slot on the ten-item list rather than coming free with standard-issue clothing. Of the 187 contestants across every US, Australian, and spinoff season, 101 have a recorded gear list, and a towel shows up on none of them. That's a documented zero in this data's sourced write-ups, not a claim that no contestant has ever dried off with one; it means no gear breakdown behind this database names a towel as one of anyone's ten choices.

The zero that's most surprising given the locations

Of the five hygiene categories, this is the one where the absence looks hardest to explain at a glance. Alone has filmed repeatedly in genuinely wet places: Vancouver Island, where the coastal rainforest climate produced two of the show's earliest seasons, Patagonia, and Tasmania, all locations where staying dry is a constant, low-grade fight rather than an occasional problem. A dedicated camp towel is a common recommendation in general backpacking gear lists specifically for wet climates like these, which makes its complete absence from 101 recorded lists notable even against the other zero-pick hygiene items.

Why it still loses to everything else

A towel solves a problem that fire already solves better. Contestants build and maintain fire constantly for cooking and warmth, and drying wet clothing or gear next to an existing fire costs nothing extra once that fire is already burning for other reasons, whereas a packed towel adds real bulk and weight for a job fire does for free. Standard-issue clothing itself, which doesn't count against the ten-item limit at all, likely absorbs some of what a towel would otherwise do, and a contestant already managing shelter, food, and fire on ten total picks has little reason to spend one on solving a problem that heat from an existing camp task handles as a side effect.

The catalog lists one product example, a PackTowl personal towel priced around $12 to $18, but that entry is flagged as a generic category placeholder in the catalog's own verification field, not a product any contestant has actually carried, so there is no real towel brand to report here at all.

Clothing-adjacent category	Recorded picks (of 101)	Winners among them
Soap	3	1
Towel	0	none
Toothpaste	0	none
Dental floss	0	none
Razor	0	none

The pattern across all five

Towel joins toothpaste, dental floss, and razor as a category with no recorded picks and no catalog product tied to a real contestant, while soap stands alone among the five with 3 carries and one winner. The common thread across the zero-pick four is that each solves a problem the show's environment, its fire, its clothing rules, or its food-focused strategy already solves by other means, which leaves personal comfort competing directly against survival tools and consistently losing.

For the full hygiene picture and how the ten-item rule treats these categories against standard-issue clothing, see clothing on Alone: what doesn't count toward your 10 items. The towel gear page has the category's full catalog entry, and the items nobody picks on Alone covers the rest of the categories in the same position.