How to Wash Your Clothes – The Meaning Behind all the Clothing Symbols on your Care Tags

by A Guest Author

With our busy lives sometimes it’s hard to stop and do things properly, but when we don’t do things properly we end up ruining things. This is a true statement when it comes to washing high quality clothing which usually ends up thrown in the wash machine, even if it doesn’t belong there.

Too many times in college did I grab a newly dried sweater that was magically too small or a pair of new bright colored pants that after one wash seemed faded. After a while repurchasing clothing became expensive so I had to sit down, do some homework, talk to my mom and actually read those clothing care labels.

Those evil clothing care labels with their abstract drawings and instructions in tiny print in 25 languages were hard to understand but after becoming a fluent in the language I learned to decipher it all.

The Little Cups: The little cups of water with the numbers written on them and the dashes underneath are a temperature guide. The numbers stand for the temperature to wash your clothing at so it will vary on each item. No bars mean a regular cycle, one bar indicates a synthetic wash and two bars is a wool-wash.

Hand Inside Cup: Wash item by hand, dry on a line. Simple.

Circle Inside of a Square: Item may be dried in a tumble dryer, which is the standard dryer. If there is a dot in the circle use a low heat setting and if there are two dots use a high heat setting. If there is an X in the circle, dry on a line.

3 Trapezoids with Dots: This littlepicture is someone’s pathetic attempt at drawing an iron, but work with it, you have to. One dot in the iron means cool setting, two dots mean warm setting and three means the hottest.

Circle: Dry clean only, so you can’t do anything about this unless your dryer has a dry clean setting. An X in the circle means do not dry clean and a P in the circle means you have no choice but to take it to a professional.

Triangles: Use bleach, any bleach but if that triangle is black with an X stay far away from the bleach unless you are trying to create a retro look.

Sometimes you may find that a garment has more than one shape saying do or do not do, which is confusing but always go with the most delicate procedure. If you are really unsure about a piece of clothing, gently rub out the dirty areas, let it soak in some cool water and hang to dry. Hand washing is tedious and can ruin really delicate clothes and although machine washing is quick, if you don’t know the correct settings your garment may come out looking like something it wasn’t. This trick above, the soaking process, will clean your clothes without ruining them and should only be done if you are completely unsure of what the tag says.

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Author Gabriella L. suggests trying out your washing skills on some new cheap formal dresses.

This post was written by A Guest Author

This post was written by a guest author. If you have high quality, useful information to share with students, send us an email or click Write For Us to learn more. And in case you're wondering - yes, you can promote yourself in this fancy author byline.

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