Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert and advice columnist. She'll be here every week helping to answer your filthiest questions. Are you dirty? Email her. Are you really dirty? Join Jolie as she solves your cleaning conundrums every Friday at 1p Eastern on Facebook Live.
This month, she'll be enrolling you in Laundry School. Each week, instead of doing a deep dive into one single query, Jolie will provide shorter answers to your most burning laundry questions. Got questions? Send them via email with the subject line "LAUNDRY SCHOOL" or tweet them to her @joliekerr using the hashtag #LAUNDRYSCHOOL.
Well, class, we made it! Laundry School is almost over, and because I'm a save-the-best-for-last type of gal, the final lesson in the curriculum is all about laundry disasters.
Before we get into these gruesome tales of washday nightmares, let's do a quick recap for those who may have missed an installment of our monthlong Laundry School. In Week 1, we covered the basics, from how to load a washing machine, to the difference between powdered and liquid detergent, to separating clothes, to the settings on your machines.
Week 2 was all about stains, from grease and oil, to chocolate and red wine, to, um, more personal stains. Week 3 saw a discussion of laundry products, from specialty detergents to whitening agents to stain- and odor-eliminators. In Week 4, we went through advanced fabric care techniques like hand-washing, steaming and ironing, as well as brightening up whites that have gone dingy, and managing the laundering of oversized items like pillows or duvets.
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So now it's time to have a little fun, and cringe sympathetically while we read about some common, but no less horrific, laundering disasters. To your questions!
Long time reader, first time with a question. I am a good and thoughtful husband most of the time. One of the exceptions happened last week, when I left a medicated Chapstick in the pocket of my pants. My wife and I did not discover this until we were folding the laundry and found grease spots on favorite pants, polo shirts, and dresses.
We will try Pine Sol, but perhaps there are other tricks? Surely I am not the first to have left a Chapstick in a pocket. Thanks for hearing my tale of laundered woe.
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I'm always available to listen to your tales of laundering woe! In fact, I love almost nothing more. I know that makes me sound a tiny bit evil, which I am, but to offset the delight I take when something goes terribly wrong with your laundry, I can at least help you figure out how to reverse it.
However, even though I have suggestions of what you can do to remove those Chapstick stains, I do need to open by telling you that the fact that the clothes went through the dryer portends doom. The heat from a dryer will set stains in, which is why I'm tempering my advice before I even give it.
With that said, you should still try to save the clothes! You may have success with every item, or at least with some of them. It's also often the case that those type of stains simply come out over time with repeated washings.
With your expectations managed, let's talk specifics. First of all, you already know about using Pine Sol (or Lestoil) to treat grease stains, which would have been the first thing I suggested. There are also a whole bunch of other tricks for removing grease stains, like using cornstarch or talcum powder to absorb the oily residue. Those are all good options.
In this case, though, we may need to bring out the big guns: Commercial degreasers. Products like Zep Heavy-Duty Citrus Degreaser or De-Solv-It can be used to remove grease stains from your clothes, but there are some REALLY IMPORTANT safety instructions to know about. They're so IMPORTANT that I'm yelling at you to make sure I get your attention. Both of those products are flammable, which means that if you're going to use them to remove stains from clothes, you must—must must must!—wash the product out using detergent and water before you put the clothes in the washer and dryer.
If that all sounds too dicey for you, try using a laundry bar like Fels Naptha, which is a heavy-duty stain remover, or a mechanic's laundry detergent formula like Permatex.
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I wash and dry most of my shirts usually on cold for wash, medium heat for dry and I've been noticing this weird thing lately. When I take my "clean" shirts out of the dryer, the armpits are still stinky! I did six (6!!!!!) loads of laundry today and I have almost a half load more of clean shirts that still smell. What to do?
Ah yes, it sounds like you've got a case of detergent and/or fabric softener buildup going on. There's a super easy fix for this—which is also the fix for gym clothes that are retaining a funky odor even after washing—that will remove both the buildup and the smell.
Run the shirts through the washer again, but skip the use of detergent and fabric softener. Use a half to a full cup of white vinegar, or an odor-eliminating laundry booster like Borax, both of which will help to cut through the buildup and nuke those smells. Turning the shirts inside out and drying them on low heat will help to make the process even more effective.
Going forward, be mindful to not overuse laundry detergent or liquid fabric softener. If the problem persists, you should consider eliminating fabric softener (liquid and dryer sheets) entirely. I can't tell exactly from your question if this is the case, but if you're letting dirty laundry linger for a long time between washings, opting to let it wait until you have six loads to do at a time, you're going to have a lot more problems with the development of odor-causing bacteria.
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My husband's shirts got left in the washer all day and came out smelling HORRIBLE!! They were soured worse than I've ever had anything sour and they weren't even in the washer for all that long. Anyway, I've tried soaking in vinegar and water, soaking in baking soda and water, and adding them both to the washer too. Please help!! They're going to have to be trashed if I can't find anything that works.
Goodness, white vinegar didn't work?!? Next you're going to tell me that Santa Claus doesn't read all of his mail.
Here's what I think may be going on: The washer itself soured along with the clothes. So you need to treat both of them. Because you already have vinegar on hand, and because it's inexpensive, go ahead and give it one more chance to prove itself by putting a half cup in the detergent dispenser and a half cup in the fabric softener dispenser. Doing so will allow the vinegar to flush out any smells that are lingering in the machine, as well as (hopefully) remove the sour smell from those shirts.
If that doesn't do it, I have one last trick up my sleeve…which brings us to the final Laundry School lesson.
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I recently returned from New Zealand. While there, I visited a few places with geothermal activity. I took precautions to avoid retaining the smell of sulfur on my clothes, but the smell not only stuck with the clothes that I wore while in places with geothermal activity but got into all of my other clothes, so now everything I had with me there smells awful. The smell of sulfur is unfamiliar to me, so I'm assuming that is what the smell is.
I've tried some of the tactics I found online, which haven't worked. Letting clothes soak in water with baking soda and then washing them was ineffective, as was attempting to let them line dry (though, as I did it in a not particularly open area in a city, it didn't get much wind).
Do you have any advice? Is there a special detergent I should get? If I can't get the smell out, I'm going to have to throw out a lot of clothes.
I have advice! I'm always tempted to refer to this as the nuclear option, but when I tell you what the product is that eliminates the rankest and most stubborn smells, you'll understand why "nuclear option" doesn't fit.
Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Pure-Castile Liquid Soap is The Thing for removing very strong odors from laundry. It doesn't sound like it should be The Thing, but it is—in the course of doing this job, I've recommended it to readers who have needed to remove strong and foul smells ranging from gasoline to deer repellent, and in every case washing the clothes in good old Dr. Bronner's was the ticket. So there you go!
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