The 5 Biggest Mistakes You’re Making Washing Your Jeans

Some swear you should never machine wash jeans (or wash them at all for that matter), but most of us toss this wardrobe staple in the washer along with other clothes every week. To keep your basic blue and black denim looking as new as possible, be sure to steer clear of these fabric-damaging mistakes.

1. Washing them right side out.
No matter the cycle, the very act of machine washing and drying is abrasive to fabrics because the garments rub against each other in the turning, tumbling load. To help minimize the color loss this can cause, turn jeans inside out before placing them in the washer and leave them inside out until you remove them from the dryer. Zip all zippers and fasten all buttons and snaps, too.

2. Cramming too many pair in at once.

The more garments you stuff into a load, the faster you’ll get done, but the more the more wear and tear your fabrics will endure. Without room to move, zippers and rivets can snag and stitching can break. Your clothes should circulate or tumble freely, so they are thoroughly cleaned and dried and don’t emerge from the machines in a tangled knot.

3. Choosing the wrong cycles.

The newer you want your jeans to look, the gentler you have to wash and dry them. While hand washing and line drying is safest, it’s also costly in terms of time and effort. Unless your jeans are particularly dirty, it’s best to wash them in cold water, select one of the gentler cycles, and dry them at a low temperature.

4. Skipping a color-preserving detergent.
Special detergents formulated to preserve dark colors really do work. They have ingredients to help fabrics hold onto dyes and to deactivate the chlorine in the water that can fade colors. If you want to keep your dark jeans dark, it’s worth investing in a special detergent. We recommend Good Housekeeping VIP Award winner Tide TotalCare and Woolite Dark.

5. Leaving them in the dryer too long.

Fabrics shrink when left in the dryer too long to get over-dried and “fried.” All fabrics and especially jeans benefit when you take them out of the dryer slightly damp. Simply tug and smooth them into shape and let them finish drying flat or on a hanger. If, even after tumbling on low heat and a delicate cycle, you see lots of lint on the dryer’s filter, you may want to switch to line drying your jeans to help preserve the fabric.

Top 5 Allergens In Soaps That Cause Dermatitis .

What is dermatitis? Dermatitis is a symptom, not a disease, and the word can apply to a wide range of skin conditions. Essentially, dermatitis is any inflammation of the skin that leads to redness, scaling, itching or tiny fluid-filled blisters. Dermatitis can have any number of causes, from fungal infection to fleas, but allergic contact dermatitis occurs when our bodies take in an allergy through our skin and, as a result, become inflamed. Like food allergies, most of these substances are harmless when ingested by people who aren’t allergic, but there are also plants (like poison ivy) that produce contact dermatitis in a majority of the population. Oddly, the most common contact allergen isn’t even a plant — it’s nickel
The quickest way to develop allergic contact dermatitis is by rubbing something you’re allergic to on your bare skin. Something we rub on our skin on a regular basis is soap. Ironically, a product that’s supposed to cleanse your skin can end up causing you a lot of pain and aggravation. We’ll take a look at five of the most common allergens in soaps that cause dermatitis.

 

1: Balsam of Peru
Balsam of Peru, also known as myroxylon, is a sticky sap that smells like vanilla and cinnamon. It’s used as an ingredient in soaps, perfumes and shampoos both for its smell and for its quality as a fixative, which helps slow down evaporation. It’s also added to certain medications and food, showing up in everything from calamine lotion to cough medicine and cola.

Cinnamein, a well-documented potential allergen, makes up between 60 and 70 percent of balsam of Peru, while the other 30 to 40 percent is made of unknown resins, any of which can provoke an allergic reaction. It’s one of the most common causes of contact dermatitis, and about half of people who have a fragrance allergy have a reaction to balsam of Peru. The most common symptom is hand eczema in the case of skin contact, and when it’s consumed, rashes may form around the mouth.

2: Paraben
Paraben is both an industrially produced and naturally occurring ester. Used as a preservative, it’s usually near the bottom of the ingredient list in shampoos, soaps, toothpaste and deodorant. Allergic reactions to it are relatively rare when you consider how common it is, but different types of parabens also often appear in the same product, increasing the chance of a reaction.

One thing that should be mentioned regarding parabens is that a 2004 study in the United Kingdom linked them to chest cancer after trace amounts of methylparaben were found in chest cancer tumor biopsies . Although further research has produced no conclusive evidence that parabens cause cancer, many consumers are still worried, preferring to take a better-safe-than-sorry approach to skin care. Whether or not the claims about the dangers of parabens are true, cosmetics companies have compensated for the backlash and now offer a wide variety of paraben-free products.

Parabens go by a long list of chemical pseudonyms, so if you think you’re allergic to paraben, check your soaps and medicine cabinet for anything with paraben or parahydroxybenzoic in it.

3: Coconut Diethanolamide
While allergic reactions to ingesting coconut are rare, it’s not uncommon to have an allergic reaction to touching them. You’d think that it would be harder for your body to deal with things you put in your mouth than stuff that just touches your skin, but coconuts are an exception. What’s more, they show up in all kinds of skin care products, both for their delicious scent and their ability to moisturize and soften skin.

However, coconuts can also be made into coconut diethanolamide, a detergent that helps create a stable lather when you’re washing with soap. Like sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), coconut diethanolamide can break down skin’s oily barrier layer and dry it out, but certain people develop more intense allergic reactions to it. Since coconut diethanolamide is a common ingredient in skin care products such as barrier creams and hand protection foams, sensitizing can happen rapidly. You may begin to develop reactions after using a product for two or three months. Regular rinse-off soaps, however, take much longer to produce a reaction — more like five to seven years . Check ingredient lists for coconut diethanolamide, and be aware that it may be masquerading under such names as coconut oil acid, cocamide DEA, ninol, witcamide and calamide.

4: Fragrance
Wait, fragrance? Isn’t that a little general? Unfortunately, yes. The soap market is a cutthroat place, and companies are cagey about revealing the ingredients that make their formulas smell just right. When you see fragrance listed as an ingredient on a skin care product, you’re looking at a top-secret mix of esters, ketones, aldehydes, amines and more. This makes it difficult to construct allergy tests for fragrance because, in North America in particular, we don’t even know what the ingredients in most fragrances are.
Even though fragrance doesn’t actually contribute to skin cleansing, it’s one of the most common contact allergens in soap. Furthermore, fragrance allergens are found in just about any cosmetic product that doesn’t carry a “fragrance-free” label. And because the cosmetics industry (which is largely self-regulated in the United States) is pretty secretive about its formulas, the estimated range of cosmetic products that contain the fragrance allergens used for skin patch testing is anywhere from 15 percent to all of them.

 

5: Sodium Lauryl Sulfate
Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) is a common ingredient found in soaps and shampoos. SLS is a detergent, which means it does a good job of breaking up oil and grease. It’s also the substance that makes soap get frothy when you rub it on your body.
So how does SLS contribute to contact dermatitis? One common skin-care myth is that the oil on our bodies is dirty, but the truth is that we need a reasonable amount of it for protection. While SLS is useful for breaking up greasy foreign substances, it also breaks up the layer of oil that keeps our skin from drying out. And while it’s not technically an allergen because it doesn’t provoke a reaction from the immune system, SLS can cause contact dermatitis and aggravate eczema by weakening that oily barrier on our skin. This means that SLS can usher other allergic elements into your body. After repeated exposure to these elements, you may develop reactions to things you weren’t allergic to before.
If you’re having a problem with dry, itchy skin, check your soap for sodium lauryl sulfate. It also appears in toothpaste and bubble bath — pretty much anything that foams up to get you clean.