How to prevent clothing from fading in the wash

Name: Michael

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Sodium Metabisulfite USP/FCC Grade. 3 Lb.

Country or region: Pennsylvania, USA

Message: Hey Paula,

I have just started updating my wardrobe, replacing some of my well-worn and faded shirts, shorts and pants. I stumbled upon your website while researching how to preserve the quality/extend the life of my new garments. So far I've read that adding baking soda, black pepper powder, vinegar or a combination thereof to the wash and/or rinse cycle will help preserve colors and prevent bleeding, but some of the information seems contradictory at best. Reading through your site has answered a lot of my questions, but has created a few as well. :)

- Even though vinegar has no effect on setting dyes, could it possibly prevent colors from bleeding? Or are the functions one in the same?
- Is there ANY benefit to adding baking soda to the wash cycle?
- Are soda ash or any of its alternatives worth pursuing for my purpose? Or are they only viable for manually-died fabrics?
- Am I really just needlessly worrying? Should I just turn garments inside-out prior to washing, wash like colors, use a gentle detergent with cold water, don't leave them in the drier too long and call it a day?

Just so you know, I've already corresponded with G&K labs regarding whether Retayne would be useful for my intended purpose, but its ingredient list has made me second-guess.

I do think you may be needlessly worrying, depending on the methods used by the manufacturers of the clothing you wear. Most of them probably already use a commercial equivalent of Retayne; this is why commercial clothing is now so much less likely to bleed in the wash than it was when I was a child. It eventually does wear off with time, so the dyes ultimately do fade. Washing in cool water is the best way to extend the life of fabric treatments similar to Retayne, so it will help your clothing stay bright (or dark) longer. Washing in hot water removes cationic dye fixatives like Retayne, and warm water will not enable it to last as long as cool water will.

What I always do with my own laundry is turn it inside out and launder in cool water. Cool water helps prevent clothing from bleeding. Most of my clothing does not bleed in the wash at all. Of course, it helps that I never use all-purpose dye, such as Rit, when I dye my own clothing. The fiber reactive dye I prefer to use does not bleed in the laundry. I turn my clothing inside out more to reduce wear on the surface than out of any care about color fading. Turning your clothing inside out for every single laundering is the best way to prevent the development of pilling on the surface of knit garments, such as t-shirts. It also helps prevent the surface wear that causes indigo denim to appear to fade (which is in large part caused by surface abrasion, not by the fading of the dye itself).

However, the chloramines now added in many water treatment facilities damage the dye in clothing much more than the older forms of chlorine that were used in previous decades. My home-dyed clothing, dyed the same way as that which used to stay bright for me for several hundred washes, are now noticeably faded after only one hundred washes. There is a good chemical way to prevent this fading, if you are willing to go to the trouble. What you need to do is obtain sodium bisulfite or sodium metabisulfite, also known as Anti-Chlor. The cheapest way to get it may be to mail-order it; a good source is PRO Chemical & Dye, in Massachusetts. You can also obtain it from a store that sells home winemaking supplies, either as a powder with the chemical name on it, or in the form of a product called Camden Tablets. I think that the more dilute solutions available from aquarium supply stores are likely to be more expensive per use. If you add three tablespoons (3/4 of a quarter of a cup) of sodium metabisulfite to every twenty-gallon washing machine load, it should significantly slow down fading that is caused by the disinfectants added to ensure the safety of the water supply. For more information on this and related (but more expensive) chemicals, see "How can I neutralize the damaging effects of chlorine bleach?".

Black pepper powder is rather amusing as a home remedy to prevent dyes from fading. I predict that reasonable quantities of it (less than a pound per load) will have absolutely no effect on whether dyes fade, but it may impart an interesting scent to your laundry. Using a significant quantity could be rather expensive, as well.

There is no need for baking soda or vinegar in the laundry to prevent the dye from bleeding. In the last year or so, I have started using vinegar in the final rinse in order to prevent the growth of odor-causing bacteria (important when laundering towels to be used in a humid climate), but this doesn't do anything noticeable in protecting the color of my clothing. In fact, odor prevention is the only real reason to use either vinegar or baking soda in the laundry. Never use both baking soda and vinegar at the same time, by the way, because they will neutralize each other.

Soda ash, which is another form of the same chemical found in washing soda, is a very good cleaner, so it's found in most laundry detergent powders. It will not serve to set the dye in fabric in the laundry, however. It must be used only when the dye is applied, not later on in the wash, and will work only on fiber reactive dyes, not the direct dye that is commonly used in commercial clothing due to its cheapness.

Retayne and other cationic dye fixatives work by sticking to dye molecules that are not well bound to the fibers in clothing. The larger aggregations of the positively-charged dye fixative and the negatively-charged dye molecules tend to stick much better in the negatively-charged textile fibers. Retayne is applied by soaking fabric in hot water with a small amount of the Retayne added; it will last through many launderings, if the treated garments are washed only in cool water. One can find advertisements for cationic dye fixatives that are claimed to be formaldehyde-free for use in the textile industry on clothing intended for sale in Europe, where formaldehyde regulations are stricter than those in the US, but none of the dye fixatives available for home use in the US are completely free of formaldehyde, although, after dilution for sale in the crafts industry, they may contain so little formaldehyde that it does not need to be listed on the MSDS safety pages for the products.

Is it the presence of these small amounts of formaldehyde in the Retayne that bothers you? I can understand your not wanting to use anything with formaldehyde, since it is poisonous and a known human carcinogen, one to which we are exposed at surprisingly large levels in the form of anything from salon hair-straightening treatments (often labeled "formaldehyde free" even when they contain dangerously high levels of formaldehyde!) to inexpensive furniture made of pressed wood. Undiluted Retayne contains approximately 0.15% formaldehyde, if my information is correct. We are supposed to use 5 milliliters of this product per yard of fabric; if added to a one-gallon bucket of water, this works out to be 2 parts per million of formaldehyde, some of which will be dumped out afterwards with the excess water. This is significantly less than the amount of formaldehyde exposure we might get from, say, being in the same room with a piece of new particleboard furniture, but it is still an exposure that we'd like to avoid.

Ironically, though, the clothing whose color you are trying to protect probably already contains formaldehyde. It is an unfortunate fact that the majority of clothing sold in the US is processed with formaldehyde, although the presence of formaldehyde in the clothing is never declared on the label. Formaldehyde is used to in some products that make cheap direct dyes wash-resistant, and it is commonly present in fabric finishes that provide wrinkle resistance and other popular properties to clothing, often at levels much higher than you will find as the result of treatment with Retayne. This is why it is important for everyone to always wash new clothing, before the first wearing, in order to reduce exposure to formaldehyde, although it is impossible to remove all of it. I am not sure that even clothing labeled "organic" is always free of these finishes, although it ought to be, because there is woefully little enforcement of any regulations concerning the use of these chemicals.

At any rate, using sodium metabisulfite as a color preservative in the wash does not involves any exposure to formaldehyde. It is not good to breathe the fumes from sulfites such as sodium metabisulfite, especially if you have asthma, since it can generate irritating sulfur dioxide, but this is not likely to be a problem with any reasonable amount of care, in the brief exposures involved in just adding a small cup of the powder to a washing machine.

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Posted: Friday - July 08, 2011 at 09:28 AM

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How to prevent clothing from fading in the wash

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