Reddit but in Non-Reddit Links

Original Link All credit is due to the OP on Reddit u/KismaiAesthetics. It was only brought here due to some people not having access to Reddit.

r/laundry is filled with tales of woe - smelly armpits, mystery stains, socks the color of cream of mushroom soup - complete with mysterious embedded dark chunks. I personally love solving these problems (and the reactions when people post the process and results of disaster recovery are extremely popular there).

But what of people who just have normal laundry and want a little tune-up? Or have never done their own laundry before? How about some love and guidance for the non-smelly, non-stained, non-crusty? Here's something for them. How I do normal laundry day-to-day.

What people are often surprised to learn is that I really don’t enjoy doing laundry. I don’t think it’s an act of service - I think it’s survival, and I further think expending the minimal amount of time and effort that respects my textiles (and the human and resource inputs that went in to making them) is the best use of my time. It just needs to be done right the first time, every time, so I can watch cat videos on the Internet.

There’s no one right way to do laundry, just like there’s no one right way to make a grilled cheese sandwich. Much like slightly-stale sourdough with a skim of dijon mustard inside and a blend of sharp cheddar and either fontina or Monterey Jack, fried in Whirl is my favorite way to do the latter, this is my laundry default method, developed over the years of contending with my messes. 95%+ of the loads I do fall in this rubric. Also note that I’m in North America with water softer than about 75% of households.

There are endless corner cases, including silk, wool, down, GoreTex and other waterproof technical fabrics, semi-synthetics like rayon, viscose, “bamboo”, modal, Lyocell and Tencel, silver-infused, FR and anti-static, pillows and stuffed toys, shoes and rugs. I’ll get to those later.

This is for:

• Towels
• Sheets / Duvet Covers / Pillowcases
• Clothing (other than Dry Clean Only pieces)
• Which are at least 95% the following fibers:
  • Cotton
  • Linen
  • Hemp
  • Ramie
  • Polyester / Dacron
  • Nylon / Polyamide
  • Acrylic
  • Lycra / Spandex / Elastane

Please note: I have a problem. I don’t think you absolutely need to do this much to have very good results. You could easily combine the dark and lights in a color family, for example, especially if you use a detergent with anti-redeposition or use color catchers. It’s also likely you could combine neutrals and embellished whites successfully.

I have a lot of laundry categories. I also don’t look good in yellow or orange, so I don’t own it. If you do, good for you, and you could aim at the red loads and move the purples to the dark blues and greens. I wear a lot of plum and purple. I have a bunch of IKEA Frakta/Storstomma 80 liter bags hanging up, and stuff gets sorted into them daily. When they’re mostly full, I run the load.

• Black, charcoal, navy and dark brown
• Dark blues and greens
• Dark reds and purples
• Light blues and greens
• Light reds and purples
• Neutrals like khaki, tan, ecru, light grey and taupe
• Whites with stripes / embellishment
• Absolute plain white
• Socks & Underwear (cotton blends, mostly white)
• Sheets (by color)
• People Towels (by color)
• Kitchen & Pet Towels (all white, presoaked with chlorine bleach for sanitizing in my world)

The towels and sheets get isolated in this scheme because for me, I need to dry the sheets on Delicate and the towels on High. Your sheets may be more durable or you may be willing to separate them between the wash and dry. They’re both full loads for me, without the need to combine to make a good load.

Sorting like this gives me flexibility in the choice of chemistry, and doesn’t require me to take any special precautions to prevent color transfer in anything but the first wash of an item. I also care a lot less about lint, because the lint is largely invisible when it’s between items of like color and intensity.

I am a pretreater. One of the first laundry tasks I was ever trusted with by my legendarily persnickety mother was identifying stains for pretreating, and eventually I was trusted with her can of old-skool Spray ’n’ Wash with solvents. Detergents and equipment have improved a lot in the years since mumblemumble, but I still pretreat, in exchange for not having to check every garment for lingering stains between wash and dry.

The Usual: Stains from Food, Plants and Animals Including Myself

This is the most common cause of stains on my laundry. It’s like I never learned to use cutlery as a toddler. It’s also the most common cause of spots on most textiles for most people.

My not-so-secret weapon against these stains? Enzyme pretreater. They’re safe on the listed fabrics regardless of color, they’re not smelly or environmentally sketchy, they work extremely well and there are many to choose from. There’s a list on the spreadsheet linked at The Lipase List (google drive link) on the Pretreater tab. Pick whichever one sounds good - they all work about the same because their formulae are about the same.

​I've got a stockpile of old-formula Tide Rescue that I'm emotionally attached to in a less-than-healthy way, but I've also been happy with Whole Foods and Open Nature. I'll pick up a bottle of the President's Choice next time I'm in Canada.

Spritz or squirt the stains at least a half-hour before laundering, up to about a week. These removers are working so long as they’re damp, and once they’ve worked, the stain washes out with detergent - so don’t be discouraged if the stain still appears to be there before washing.

I work on cars and do motorsports. I get automotive grease on me. Enzyme pretreaters are nothing special on this kind of oily soil. What works is nonionic surfactant, the active ingredient in many heavy-duty liquid detergents. Anything can work here. I usually have some Tide or Persil around for this purpose. If you get these spots, hit them with some liquid detergent at least fifteen minutes before washing. Penetration is improved if you dilute 1:1 with tap water. Tamping the mixture in with a brush or spoon can help improve first-wash removal. This is also a solid pretreater for waterproof/water resistant makeup stains.

Ink merits special consideration. While many inks and markers and crayons will come out with standard wash, many will not. If I see an ink mark on something, I pretreat it with a specialist product, either Amodex or Carbona Stain Devil 3, Ink, Marker & Crayon, following the label directions carefully.

These three categories cover 99% of my laundry woes. Ask r/laundry or DM me for advice if you have something else on your textiles. Don’t dump v1negar on it as a default.

I argue that it’s the responsibility of whoever wore the garment to check the pockets before things go in the hamper, barring some debility or being too young to understand the risks of not doing so (which in my case could rise to capital punishment). But it behooves the launderer to give a final check. The launderer is entitled to keep anything they find that they want, including cash, jewelry, electronics and snacks. Consider it a tip.

I have a 4.5 ft^3 LG front loader. Truly middle of the pack. If I’m using powders in the wash cycle, they go in the back of the drum now. We’ll come back to that topic.

I add enough textiles to reach at least 75% of the way up the opening but not so many there isn’t a fist worth of space open at the top of the drum. Loading this full optimizes the mechanical action of the wash. I check the door seal drains for lint or hair or debris before shutting the door.

If something has straps narrower than about 2” or is of delicate construction that could be prone to stretching (a sweater like a knit cotton cardigan, not a sweatshirt), it goes in a mesh delicates bag, alone. If it has screen printed graphics or is denim, it gets turned inside out to protect the surface appearance. If you want your jeans to exhibit more character at friction points, wash right side out. Zippers are zipped. Buttons and snaps are unfastened. Velcro is adjusted so no scratchy part is exposed. Hoodie strings are tied.

When I still use a conventional top loader, like on vacation,I loosely load it dry to the water fill line that you can usually see on the agitator. I would then adjust the water fill level so, after a couple minutes of agitation, the textiles have between 3/4 and two inches of water above them. 1.5 is perfect.

I’m a sweaty greasy mess who drops food. So obviously I use an enzyme detergent. I maintain a list at The Lipase List (google drive link) where you can find something you like that works with your water. I don’t care about the presence or absence of fragrance one way or the other, but if the product is fragranced it has to be unobtrusive. From an olfactory perspective, I really don’t want $5 of my perfume overpowered by $0.02 worth of laundry fragrance.

As of this writing, I’m doing 60+% of my loads with 1.5 oz of Wegmans Free & Clear liquid “with stainfighting enzymes”, and either a label dose of Febu or an ounce of 365 Sport detergent plus a dose of an oxi booster of the Biz/OxiClean/Kirkland Signature/365 types. The Wegmans liquids all have optical brightener in them.

Anything darker than “medium navy” is getting Tide liquid (currently the dregs of a jug of Hygienic Clean I forgot I owned) + Febu. No OBA. That works out to about 25% of my loads when darks are seasonally appropriate.

​The other 15% of these animal-fiber-free loads get 4.5T / 70ml ofTide with Bleach powder. It’s purely vibes and color that define which gets which when. Only things qualifying as lights or lighter get the TwB. I also use TwB on kitchen towels because they don’t get a lot of benefit from DNase - might as well save a little cash.

Automotive loads get 3 oz / 90ml of Tide/Persil liquid and a cup/ 250mL of ammonia. You can’t beat the cleaning of a high-performance conventional-surfactant liquid on petrochemical soils. Ammonia helps the grease removal.

I am a massive fan of citric acid rinsing. It leaves my cottons cottonier, my polyesters slicker and my animal fibers softer and smoother. I use a shade over 2 tsp / 10g citric acid crystals right in the softener dispenser. My machine likes the dry just fine and I don’t get residual crunchies after the wash. YMMV. Details of the Why of citric rinsing here (reddit link).

TL;DR - warm water, Normal cycle, extra rinses, adjusting soil level as appropriate with just enough detergent to do the job, citric acid in the rinse.

I generally wash on Normal because these items are Normal. I usually set the soil level to the maximum - this extends the agitation to get maximum cleaning with no downside except a time penalty.

I usually select a warm wash for clothing and a hot wash for socks/underwear, towels and sheets. The exception to this is clothing with automotive soils - it gets much cleaner on hot wash because of the nature of the soils. My warm wash is about 102F/39C. Barely over body temperature, slightly cooler than I like my bathwater or shower, completely appropriate for bathing an infant. Using water of this temperature lets me use half the agitation time as I would at 82F/28C to get the same cleaning results, and one fourth the agitation time as would be required at 62F/17C. Rinses are always cold on my machine.

Yes, please. All of them. As many as the machine will let me select. Even with perfectly dosed detergent, you’re going to get some carryover from wash to rinse, and at the end of the first rinse, my clothes are still of higher pH than my tap water. That’s a definitive indication that there is still wash chemistry in there. pH is easy to measure on finished fabrics (just touch pH paper to the damp textiles and see for yourself) and it’s therefore the best proxy for rinse thoroughness. Three gallons of extra water for each rinse cycle is pocket lint compared to the other ways we use water in the US, and it’s respectful to your skin and the textiles to get them throughly rinsed. My machine dispenses the softener cup in the last selected rinse, so my final pH is lower than tap water thanks to the citric acid.

Send it. Unless an item is stuffed or of extremely delicate construction (like a $500 bra), spin speed is a synonym for “how much detergent-infused water would you like to get rid of?” I’d like to maximize that. High speed spin it is.

I then go off and ignore the machine for 2:07. It’s laboring. I don’t need to. I come here and talk about laundry.

For as much time as I want my clothes to spend in the washer, and my longstanding enthusiasm for warmer wash temperatures, my feelings about the dryer go the other way.

The dryer is where clothes (especially natural and semisynthetic fibers) go to die. Hot dry air is lethal to clothing. Overdrying is so much worse than any notional “overwashing”.

Unless it’s a towel, if it’s going in the dryer, it’s going on Delicate, Sensor Dry, set to “less dry”, and all the “wrinkle guard”/cool down my 1987 Kenmore can muster. This leaves most cotton-rich fabrics barely damp to the touch, slightly damper at the seams. At the end of the cycle, they are room temperature and that trace of dampness ensures they never got too hot during the cycle to come up to “damaged fiber”. As a result, my lint screen has barely the faintest trace of lint from clothing loads (although, admittedly, we don’t wear a ton of fleece). Shirts and pants get hung out of the dryer, other clothing gets piled loosely in an open basket to acclimate / finish drying at ambient.

Sheets get dried all the way to dry on delicate (a tiny fraction closer to the “dry” setting than the “less dry” and sometimes they need an hour laid out on the bed before they’re completely dry.

Towels get dried sensor dry hot as a final microbial kill step and come out hot to the touch.

If the item is more than about 75% synthetic content, it’s getting hung to dry right out of the washer. My laundry room is warm and dry and these fibers dry so quickly. Limiting exposure to heat is especially important for blends with Lycra/spandex/elastane. It’s like the fountain of youth for elastics to avoid dry heat. // That’s it. That’s how I do laundry.//

Products mentioned here are mentioned because I like them; I haven’t been paid to mention any of them. Trademarks are those of the trademark holders. The work is my original work and I retain copyright. My financial disclosure information and how I get paid for this work can be found at https://www.kismai.com/about-kismai/Money

Original Link by Reddit u/Fair-Shift-1962 Editors Note: This will include a fair amount of images that apparently refuse to load. I also fixed some formatting from the original post.

So- im making this post as fellow photo-protection & laundry geek becouse ammount of post about these stains is just litte too much

<Image of a white shirt with yellow stains on it here>

r/laundry - typical sunscreen stain- pic taked by u/Practical_Water_6040 typical sunscreen stain- pic taked by u/Practical_Water_6040

sunscreen stains are special & mixed type of stain

they are based on 4 things

1. uv filters which have yellow color (mostly chemical/organic ones)
2. reaction of copper/iron ions coming from tap water with these uv filters which after oxidation makes stain even more orange/ yellow , its just rust stain
3. film formers, polymers which keeps sunscreen film on the skin making sunscreen water resistant, they unfortunetly also binds into fabrics and keeps sunscreen on the fabric
4. oil phase of the emulsion which disolves oil soluble uv filters but makes oil stains as well

<Image of a traditional color wheel here> (similar to This one with image text: color pallete- as u see yellow counteracts violet/purple

almost all chemical/ organic filters are yellow becouse they need to absorb ultra violet rays, and as u see- yellow absorbs violete color (the only organic filters i know to have white color are: tinosorb m - white powder which works like in-organic (mineral) & organic filter in the same time, second organic uv filter i know to have white color is HAA299 - aka basf competitor to loreal's mexoryl 400 / mce, and the third one is uvinul a2b)

for example:

• MEXORYL 400 is yellow powder which disolves in both oil& water phase
• octisalate is yellow liquid
• tinosorb s is yellow powder which dissolves in oil phase (which btw is gonna be approved by fda next year )
• avobenzone is yellow powder which dissolves in oil phase

unfortunetly, higher spf = higher % of yellowish uv filters= higher risk of yellow color of sunscreen and higher risk of yellow stains

so older organic uv filters like oxybenzone, avobenzone , octocrylene reacts with iron & copper irons coming from water when suncreen stained fabric is getting washed , and during drying these iron/ copper ions gets oxidised and they turn orange/yellow aka they turn into rust stain

thankfully new generation uv filters like mexoryls (sx, xl, 400), tinosorbs (s, m) , uvinuls (t150, a plus, a2b) are less likely to react with these ions (thats why korean sunscreens which are often based only on new gen uv filters dosnt cause sunscreen stains)

film formers & polymers , like netlock technology in loreal groupe sunscreens ( C12-22 Alkyl Acrylate/​Hydroxyethylacrylate Copolymer) are added into sunscreen to make film of sunscreen which more resistant to sweat, water, rubbing from skin so you are longer protected if u forget to reapply them (but even when they are more resistant- u need to reapply them). They also make sunscreeen more lightweight.

But due increased resistancy when sunscreen got transfered into fabric, its also harder to remove from fabric

if more water resistant is sunscreen than its harder to remove

some sunscreens also includes polyquaternium as polymers

and polyquats are very well known to cause stains

i reccomend look into u/KismaiAesthetics post about polyquats https://www.reddit.com/r/laundry/comments/1m8r0lv/polyquat_spots/

(korean sunscreens due less resistant film formers are not resistant to sweat& water are more appopriate to city use, not beach use. And if u gonna use them on beach u must to reapply every 2 h)

since 95% of chemical uv filters are dissolved in oils, they are in oil phase

and the emolients ,waxes , esters can cause oily stain on fabrics.

• wait 20 min after applying sunscreen to allow sunscreen to form film on skin and reduce sunscreen transfer from skin to fabric
• if u think about applying sunscreen on whole body/hands: look for upf clothing/hats/gloves
• wear dark clothing to reduce visibility of stain on fabric - black fabrics dosnt show sunscreen stain (unless sunscreen is mineral/inorganic aka titanium dioxide/zinc oxide based)
• pretreat your sunscreen contaminated fabrics with liquid detergent before every wash , apply liquid on contaminated areas and leave for 30 min minimum
• use water softener like calgon due chelators in it chelating metal ions from water

1 year ago i did it test with calgon

• <Image of a white tshirt and text across stating: 'a tshirt with a tag will be washed with calgon, and a tshirt without a tag will be washed without clagon' here> with text: i taked 2 same 100% white cotton tshirts
• <Image of Sun ozon 30 LSF HOCH (suncscreen) here> with text: i applied/used this sunscreen which uses: avobenzone, octisalate, octocrylene, titanium dioxide

i applied/used this sunscreen which uses: avobenzone, octisalate, octocrylene, titanium dioxide

• <Image of the back of the sunscreen bottle with text over it stating: ' Uses: Octocrylene Avobenzone Octisalate Titanium Dioxoide' here> with text:Sunscreen stains- what cause them, how to prevent & remove them
• <Image of taped off square on a tshirt with text over it stating: 'On this squire i will put 1 teaspoon of sunscreen' here> with text:on specially maded square i applied 1 teaspon of spf on each shirt
• <Image of 3 tshirts, 3 taped outlines, all with sunscreen inside the tape on the shirt here> with text:i left shirts like that overnight for sunscreen to set
• <Image of shirts inside of a washing machine here> with text: then i washed them both in a same cycle- 1h daily wash in 40*c
• <Image of Laundry detergent Denk mit vollwaschmittel with text 'As detergent' here> with text: which have lipase, to both cycles i used same ammount of detergent aka 50 ml
• <Image of blue bottle of Denk mit Anti-kalk-gel with text written over it 'and ofc' here> with text: but to one cycle i added 50 ml of calgon dupe from dm which uses polycarboxylates and sodium citrate
• <Image of white tshirt with slight yellow stain with text over it saying 'without calgon' here> with text: as u see calgon one have less visible stain
• <Image of white tshirt with slightly less visible yellow stain and text that says 'with calgon' here> with text: washed with calgon so as u see calgon reduces sunscreen stains
• <Image of another with and without tshirt, with calgon tshirt has less taining here>

so personally i had success with removing this stains with laundry detergent pretreatment, washing and than rust remover from carbona/dr beckmann and again washing

but there are few ways-

• one includes rubbing alcohol to remove polymers, than washing in liquid detergent, than applying rust remover and washing again
• another method is sun, since sun can degrade yellow uv filters, but this will not work on polymers & iron / copper ions and personally i didnt find it effective
• third method is simmilar to mine method i use, but instead of oxalic acid rust remover u gonna use citric acid.
• fourth method is using reducing agent, for example iron out in wash / as presoak

what about oxygen/chlorine bleach? while some persons claims that oxi clean or clorox removed sunscreen stain its more likely these methods will cause that [I think they meant this] pink stains:

<Image of white button up shirt with pink stains here> with text:@slapstick_18 from twitter.com @slapstick_18 from twitter.com