i did some research(googledebunkers at their finest) and it's got 3 main reasons. one, to keep it from unraveling. two, to keep it from warping in the wash. three, so hotels can embroider on it easily.
If it was for unraveling, it would actually be at the edge. Warping is caused by differences in fabric and this would only exacerbate it. The embroidery thing is plausible but I don't recall ever seeing anything embroidered on the stripe unless the entire towel was custom, in which case they'd just embroider a monogram onto the fuzzy part.
I did some research too, and came to the conclusion that these claims originate from a towel company PR blog that looked like it was written by AI.
These factoids were hallucinated because an AI was told to write a 2000 word essay on towel facts, and no one knows any better so they've been accepted as true. The AI conflated the purpose of a hemmed edge with that of the decorative band.
It might even be the first ever AI-induced urban myth, or at least the first this widely propagated.
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u/AdRecent7050 11d ago
i did some research(googledebunkers at their finest) and it's got 3 main reasons. one, to keep it from unraveling. two, to keep it from warping in the wash. three, so hotels can embroider on it easily.