Dry a little tenderness

If you cast your mind back to student life, you'll remember the unpleasant experience of sharing a flat with a bunch of people who had varying levels of commitment to personal hygeine. There's nothing worse than finding your toothbrush lodged in the soapdish, or reaching for a cereal bowl to discover remnants of yesterday's porridge.

But as disgusting as those incidents are, for my money there's nothing worse than slowly realising that someone else has used your bath-towel. It's bad enough that it's damp and smells of someone else's shower-gel. But the really worrying thing is that you're unsure as to which bits of towel touched which random body parts.

That's the underlying psychosis that must have informed the creation of the 'True Clean Towel' - a cleverly designed bath sheet that gives a clear indication of which area of the towel is intended for which area of skin. Drying your face? Then you should be using the section clearly labelled 'top'. And if you're looking to demoisturise your nether regions, then there's an area called 'bottom' with your name on it (not literally).

Weirdly though, this is a towel aimed at single-occupancy households - for people who can't bear to come into contact with their own body parts. And the online ad makes that perfectly clear, with a male model attempting to dry himself with a giant pair of bollocks. 

Try watching this guy teabagging his own face with a massive set of pods - it's like shower time after a rugby match. There's even a particularly authentic moment when he plucks an errant pube from his mouth, as if to demonstrate the real dangers of indiscriminate towel usage. 

At first, the ad is pretty funny, before taking a turn towards the nauseating - like a Little Britain sketch thrown out for being too distasteful. As if that would ever happen.

If you're irrationally afraid of your own perianal scent, then you know what to ask Santa for this Christmas. And as long as he's not busy terrorising the villages of Finland, he may well deliver.