Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert and advice columnist. She’ll be here every other week helping to answer your filthiest questions. Are you dirty? Email her.
I’m trying to be completely natural with my cleaners (yes I know I am a hippie), so I currently use a combo of Peppermint Dr. Bronner’s, Borax and washing soda in a recipe I found online for my clothes. It works great, I haven’t noticed any of the fading etc. that some people report when they switch to homemade detergents.
The only thing that doesn’t get clean is my synthetic fabric workout gear. I use a lot, I workout sometimes twice a day and don’t re-wear gross sweaty clothes. So my laundry is about one or two loads of just workout clothes a week. I wash them separately on cold, so maybe that’s why they aren’t getting cleaned as well? IDK, I’m a newbie to natural cleaning practices. If my current detergent is the problem, do you have any solutions that would work better. I’ve heard vinegar might help, but wouldn’t the acetic acid just neutralize the base in both the soap and the carbonate ion of the washing soda?
Funky-smelling gym clothes happen, this is more or less a fact of life. They happen to me, in fact! Which I tell you mostly because people sometimes say things to me like, “Well if you’re such a Clean Person, then why do you even have to know how to clean things up?” And then I lock them in a closet with only a bucketful of bleach and ammonia to keep them company because seriously? (Squalor PSA: That is a joke, please do not ever mix bleach and ammonia together!)
Before we get into de-funktifying your yoga pants, a quick detour to discuss why gym clothes tend to hold onto smells even after being washed. Essentially, what goes on is that the fibers aren’t fully penetrated by the wash water, which happens for a few reasons: (1) the nature of fabrics like Spandex and Lycra is that they repel water. Which is great when you’re working up a massive sweat and your clothes aren’t waterlogged from it, but it’s obviously less great when waterlogged (and detergent-logged) is what you want! (2) Build up of body oil, detergent and/or fabric softener contributes to the inability of water to penetrate the fibers.
Fabric softener in particular is to be avoided when laundering gym gear made of synthetic materials—it leaves behind a coating that will prevent the clothes from getting fully cleaned. You’ll also want to use less detergent, as counterintuitive as that seems, to prevent build up on techie-type fabrics. If you suspect that build up is causing your clothes to retain an unpleasant odor, one suggestion is to run them through the wash cycle with no detergent at all, which can help to rinse away any lingering excess detergent or fabric softener. One more thing that can cause smells to linger is drying your exercise togs on high heat, so stick with a lower temperature if you machine dry. At the end of this little chit chat, I’ll list out some more best practices when it comes to washing your workout clothes. As always, you should chime in with your tips!
But back to that vinegar question! So white vinegar is indeed the trick but there are a few things to know, method-wise, that will help to maximize its effect, both of which will address your concerns about the vinegar neutralizing the base in the soap or the soda.
The first method, which, to the extent it means anything to you, is the one I use, is to pre-soak the gear in 1 cup of white vinegar and cold water before laundering as usual. I usually do this in my (CLEAN!) kitchen sink and just let the stuff chill out for 15-30 minutes, then throw it in the wash. It works for me because I can spend the time gathering up the rest of the dirty laundry, the detergent, my quarters, etc. and means I won’t be tethered to the washing machine awaiting its final cycle. Which leads nicely into the second method for employing white vinegar: adding a cup of it to the machine’s rinse cycle. Oh right, and if you’re trying to eliminate a major stink, you can up that to two cups.
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