The 5 Products That Changed How I Take Care of My Clothes
I used to be pretty careless with laundry.
Not lazy exactly. I washed my clothes, I dried them, I put them away. But I wasn't really thinking about what I was doing or what it was doing to my clothes over time. Things would pill. Colors would fade. A shirt I loved would come out of the wash looking a little worse than it went in, until eventually it looked worn out and I'd stop reaching for it.
At some point I got tired of that cycle. I started looking into how to treat clothes better. How to keep them looking the way they looked when I first got them, for as long as possible.
Turns out, a few simple products make a really big difference.
These are the five things I now use regularly. They're all on Amazon, none of them are expensive, and each really does have an important job to do.
The number of things I used to just accept as ruined before I found this.
A stain hits, you do your best with dish soap and hope, and you either get lucky or you don't. I had a whole mental category of clothes that were just quietly retired to the back of the closet.
Miss Mouth's changed that. You spray it on the stain, let it sit for a few minutes, and throw the item in the wash. It works on food, grease, and the mystery stains you find two weeks later with no memory of making. I've used it on things I'd already convinced myself were done for.
It's $8. I keep a bottle under the sink and one in the laundry room.
Part of taking better care of clothes is paying attention to what's actually washing them.
I switched to Mrs. Meyer's Lavender a while back and haven't looked for anything else since. It's plant-derived, it rinses clean, and your clothes come out smelling good. Not perfume-y or fake, just clean and calm. The kind of clean that makes you actually want to do laundry.
The 64 oz bottle lasts a long time and at $16 it's not a splurge. Just a small upgrade that makes the whole routine feel a little nicer.
Once I started paying attention to fabric care, dryer sheets started to bother me.
The waxy coating they leave behind is what makes clothes feel soft, but over time it builds up on the fabric and reduces absorbency. It also builds up inside your dryer. I hadn't thought about it until I went looking.
Wool dryer balls were the swap I made and I haven't gone back. They soften clothes naturally by tumbling against them, they reduce drying time, and they don't leave anything behind. Just toss all six in with your load.
They're reusable and $10 for a pack of six. That makes for a much better deal than constantly repurchasing dryer sheets.
This one is specifically about making clothes last longer, and it does exactly that.
Pilling happens to almost every knit fabric eventually. Sweaters, fleece, even some t-shirts. Once it starts it's hard to ignore, and most people either live with it or get rid of the item. I was firmly in the "live with it" camp for years.
The fabric shaver is a ten dollar fix that takes about three minutes. You run it over the surface, it pulls the pills right off, and the item looks almost new again. I've used it on sweaters I was close to donating and brought them back into regular rotation.
The before and after will surprise you.
I avoided ironing for most of my adult life.
I had a cheap iron that took forever to heat up, barely produced steam, and lived tangled on a shelf. So I just didn't iron things. I'd shake clothes out of the dryer and hope for the best, and over time I started to notice that some of my nicer pieces just looked off because of it.
Getting a good iron turned out to be the missing piece.
The Rowenta heats up fast, the steam is actually powerful, and the retractable cord means it stays neat when it's not in use. I use it regularly now. Not for everything, but for the pieces that deserve a little extra attention. The ones I want to keep looking good.
It's $80, which felt like a lot for an iron until I started using it. Now it just feels like taking care of the things I own.
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