Are women actually washing underwear in hotel coffee-makers, as one intrepid influencer suggested recently?
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Short answer: No. Not ever. Not even a little bit.
In fact, the 2025 TikTok post was likely created as ‘ragebait’ to garner more attention, views, and follows for the fitness influencer. Still, it’s raised a lot of questions for travelers… especially those who use their coffee-makers when staying in hotels.
So, is this actually a trend anywhere? Was the TikTok influencer actually passing on advice that she’d heard from fellow travelers, or was she just in it for the attention? Let’s dig in.
Inside the TikTok post that started it all
If you haven’t heard about the recent panty-washing-via-coffee-maker, let me catch you up. A fitness influencer posted on TikTok saying that women in a bind can wash their panties by placing them into the coffee-maker where the filter and grounds would normally go. From there, press brew.
According to Tara Woodcox, the influencer, “You got yourself a cleaner pair of underwear to wear!”
While Woodcox has since claimed that she’s never used the hack herself, you can’t put Pandora back into the box. Especially when it comes to suggesting that someone should wash their underwear in a machine used for brewing coffee. At best, you’ll be turned off hotel coffee-makers for the foreseeable future—at worst, you could be drinking a biohazard.
At least, if it’s true.
According to some sleuths, Woodcox originally made a similar post back in 2023. That’s drawn more questions—did she make the first post hoping it would go viral? Or does Woodcox really wash her underwear in hotel coffee-makers, for years now?
There’s no way to vet whether or not this is a real travel trend, but I’ll put in my two cents.
The good news: I’ve covered how to do laundry while traveling and even which panties are best for travel for women. I haven’t ever come across advice suggesting someone wash their underwear in a coffee-maker—and I trawl Reddit, where people feel comfortable spilling some wild secrets. In other words, I doubt I would have missed this ‘hack’ in my many years of travel and travel content research.
The bad news: Some humans are poorly behaved, and some of them travel.
If you want to use the coffee-maker in a hotel room but you’re worried about whether or not it’s clean, ask for a few disinfecting wipes at the front desk or bring them with you.
