Laundry Tips: Making Colored Clothes Look Brighter

Colored clothes look their best when their colors remain bright and vivid. Once a color fades away, it can look dull and ugly. That is why preserving the color of your clothes or making their colors look bright is really important. However, doing this can be a seemingly difficult task unless you know of some helpful tips and tricks.

Tips to Make Colored Clothes Look Brighter

Pre-Wash

• Water with Salt. Before washing colored clothes, soak them overnight in salt water to keep their colors brighter. Just add 1/4 cup of salt in a pail of water, add the clothes, and then leave overnight.
• Water with white vinegar. For every gallon of water, add 4 tablespoons of white vinegar. Soak new colored clothes into the mixture before using them to prevent bleeding and fading. Leave for at least an hour before washing. For darker jeans, the mixture should be vinegar and water of equal parts. Additionally, for old clothes, you can add a cup of vinegar during the rinse cycle. Vinegar can prevent detergent buildup in clothes which is one of the leading causes of fading.

Washing

• Sort by color. When washing, sort and wash the same colors as much as possible. This will help prevent clothes from bleeding and staining other colored clothes while helping prevent fading.
• Clothes turned inside out when washing. The tumbling action in the washing machine can cause breakage in cloth fabrics as they collide into each other. Once the fabrics are damaged, they can also affect the color of the clothes. Turning the clothes inside out will keep the outside fabric of your clothes protected.
• Cold water for washing. Aside from the savings you get by washing colored clothes in cold water, you can also keep their colors looking bright.
• Dash of black pepper. Adding a few teaspoons of black pepper into a full load of colored clothes is also effective for brightening the colors.
• Salt to restore faded colors. Add half a cup of salt during the wash cycle to restore the vividness of colored clothes.
• Baking soda to retain crispiness of color. During the wash cycle, add half a cup of baking soda to retain the vibrancy and crispiness of your colored clothes.

Drying

• When using a dryer, don’t over-dry the clothes. The heat from the dryer can be harsh on the cloth fibers as well as on dyes. Remove clothes from the dryer as soon as they dry and don’t leave them there. It is also ideal to dry similar types of fabric together so that they will have the same drying time. Otherwise, you will have to remove quick-drying items first before the cycle ends.
• Whenever possible, line-dry the clothes instead of using dryer. And keep colored clothes away from direct sunlight to prevent fading.

You don’t have to keep on buying new colored clothes if you can preserve the color of the clothes you already have. Keeping colored clothes brighter and more vivid is easier if the tips mentioned above are followed.