How to get sweat stains out of your clothes
There is a whole boatload of weird and wonderful ways to treat sweat stains that employ everything from baking soda to crushed-up aspirin.
There’s also a host of sweat stain removal products with absurd names like PitStop.
They are all great options, and we’ll talk through them and then finish up with some suggestions as to how you can prevent or at least reduce these sorts of stains from happening in the first place.
But first let’s talk a little bit about the science part of why these kinds of stains happen: even though we usually refer to them as “sweat stains,” more often than not they’re actually being caused by the deodorant/antiperspirant most of us use.
The primary active ingredient in most deodorants is alcohol; in antiperspirant the active ingredient is aluminum.
However, if you’ve switched away from antiperspirants, you should be aware that some straight-up deodorants also contain aluminum.
The aluminum reacts to sweat, which is a protein, and causes yellowing just in the same way that bleach will cause sweat and other protein stains to appear more yellow.
The last science-y thing I want to tell you—and then I promise I’ll stop and get back to soap and such—is that cotton, which is obviously a common material on which one might find a sweat stain, is also a protein.
the_light_show/Flickr This post is an excerpt from ” My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag ” by Jolie Kerr. Kerr also writes a regular cleaning advice column for Deadspin. There is a whole boatload of weird and wonderful ways to treat sweat stains that employ everything from baking soda to […]
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