Keeping your whites white when doing laundry at home can be a real challenge. I’m going to help dispel some myths and give some useful tips to keep your white garments looking their best!
Sort loads by color. Darks, lights, and whites. By washing white items alone in the laundry, you will prevent other colors from bleeding onto your precious whites. Slowly over time, when you mix loads, those other colors will bleed onto the whites and turn them into a dingy grey color. An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure here.
Use warm water and detergent in each load. Modern laundry detergents have enzymes in them that work best in warm water. Let the washing machine do its job in keeping your clothes clean, bright and white.
Don’t put a garment with a stain on it into the dryer. The heat will set the stain, sometimes permanently. Take a quick look at each item before you throw it into the dryer.
Pre-treat spots and stains you don’t think will come out on their own.
Never use chlorine bleach on your whites. Actually, never use chlorine bleach on any clothes. It turns white items yellow (it can actually burn the fibers) and it turns dark items white. Instead use oxyclean. If yellow or light brown stains remain after washing, do an oxyclean soak (follow the directions on the package). We soak a few white items every day to keep them looking great.
Wash your whites before they are heavily soiled. It’s much easier to remove a little bit of dirt each time you clean than it is to remove a lot ground in dirt all at once.
If you follow all of these tips, you will keep your whites looking great for a long time. Unfortunately some things will slowly turn grey no matter what you do. This is because they weren’t white to begin with. Clothing manufacturers sometimes use optical brighteners to make some things look white. It’s basically a trick to the human eye because the optical brighteners wash out over time and the garments return to their natural color – usually a dingy white. We use a commercial wet cleaning system that has optical brighteners built in which keeps them from washing out in the first place
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