Clothing Care Tips

Clothing Care Tips Courtesy of the National Cleaners Association

Beware of The FTC Care Label

While most garment manufacturers take great pains to give you reasonable care label instructions, there are some instructions that should make you wary.

Spot Clean Only- this means the garment must be cleaned inch by inch, by hand! It is time consuming and costly. This instruction works best for a dark color garment and one that you plan on wearing only on special occassions.

Dry Clean Exclusive of Ornamentation- his means your cleaner must remove all the trim, buttons, bows and other ornaments BEFORE the garment is processed, and then sew them back on again. Another time intensive and expensive process.

Two Distinctly Different Label Instructions- if the care label on the garment’s lining calls for washing and there is another label on the face fabric that suggests dry cleaning, your cleaner will have to remove the lining in order to process in accordance with the Care Label instructions. You don’t want to know how much that would cost.

DRYCLEAN ONLY. DO NOT TUMBLE. AIR DRY AT 100Âş it is virtually impossible for an environmentally friendly drycleaner to follow this instruction.

Protect Your Clothes at the Hair Salon
We all know the hair salon drill. The aspiring model/receptionist type directs us to the changing room, where we weigh the wisdom of removing all our street clothes and wearing their robe, against just slipping the robe on OVER our clothes and doing the cover up approach. Well, wonder no more. The answer is… take your clothes off and wear the lousy robe.

Here’s why: hair sprays and coloring solutions contain products that can discolor your clothes, and any staining that occurs is permanent, just like your hair color.

These products can seep under, around, over and through towels and other cover up gear, damaging your clothes irreversibly. Even an unintended splatter or spray can hit the mark on your pants or skirts doing damage that you may be unaware of until you clean or launder the item. So, our advice is – Go for it. Take it all off.

Remove Our Plastic Wrap FAST
Yes, you want to protect your stored clothes from airborne dust and particulate, but NO, you do not want to use the plastic covers that drycleaners place over your garments. That plastic is strictly designed for short term, in transit protection! Long term use of these plastic covers will suffocate the garment, trapping harmful gases and moisture and very possibly causing staining, mildew or other mishaps.

Always remove the plastic, and to protect your garments, cut a hole in a clean, unbleached white sheet and place that over your stored garments.

Color Code Your Closet
Sure, your friends may tease you about it, but the fact is when light garments are stored near dark garments, the sublimation of dyes can occur. This is when nitrogen gas causes dark dyes to vaporize and redeposit on light garments, creating stains.

So stand up to the jeers of friends and family, knowing the practice of color coding the clothes in your closets helps to ward against the silent staining of your light colored garments.

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