Clothes Care Label

Many people wash their clothes without taking a look at the care labels. Some of them try to read the label before they wash the clothes, but they do not really understand what the symbols mean. If you wish to keep your clothes clean, bright and new, you must learn how to read those care label properly.

From my experience, there are several types or groups of symbols including machine wash, water temperature, tumble dry, heat setting, special instructions, bleach symbols, iron symbols and dry clean symbols. Usually, machine wash, tumble dry, bleach and iron symbols are more common. You may not really need to know all of the symbols for simple and easy daily care of your clothes. Let us move on and know more about the different symbols.

Machine wash cycle symbols are printed as a liquid filled cup or container, which we call the basic symbol. The basic symbol represents the requirement of normal or regular settings of spinning. Sometimes, you may find one or two lines printed under the basic symbol. The one with one line means wrinkle resistant washer setting and the double lines mean gentle settings. A hand touching the water inside the container means the clothes can only be hand washed. A big cross on the basic symbol means no wash is required.

The second type of symbols to know is tumble dry cycle. For some very delicate clothes, even with the delicate settings, the tumble dry function may still cause damages to the clothes. The set of square symbols tells you about how you should treat your clothes for the tumble dry cycle. A square on the care label means the clothes can be machine dry. Normal setting is indicated by a circle inside the square. Other than the circle, you may find 1 or 2 more lines under the square. These two symbols signify the wrinkle resistant and delicate settings respectively. Intuitively, a cross on the normal cycle symbol means do not tumble dry.

Ironing symbols are the easiest to recognize as they are shown with an iron-like picture. The plain or basic iron symbol means the clothes are suitable for ironing. If there is 1 little dot inside the basic iron symbol, you may use low temperature settings. If there are 2 dots, you may use medium temperature settings. If there are 3 dots, you may use high temperature settings. A cross on the iron symbol means no ironing should be performed on the clothes. If the cross is on the steam coming out from the iron symbol, it means you may iron without steam.

The final set of symbol I wish to introduce to you is the bleaching symbols. Bleaching symbols are represented in triangles. A plain triangle means you can use any bleach if it is needed. If you find lines inside the triangles, it means you can only use non-chlorine bleach. If you find a black triangle with a big cross on it, it means no bleach should be applied to your clothes.

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