Wrinkled clothes are an absolute pain. Indeed, there is nothing that looks more unprofessional and unkempt than a creased shirt or pants. Whether you are out and about or working in an office, it is of paramount importance to ensure that the clothes you wear do not have wrinkles in them. The following tips will help you defeat the scourge of wrinkles in your clothes without having to resort to the iron. However, we will first look at the reasons why wrinkles appear in the first place.
Why Do Clothes Wrinkle?
You can blame a simple combination of water and heat for the existence of wrinkles in your clothes. The fabric of clothes contain fibres which are held in place by bonds. Heat causes these bonds to break causing the fibres to move. Once the clothes cool, these fibres are locked into their new position. Ironing clothes moves these fibres once again and this process also explains why clothes left in a bundle after drying become wrinkled. Clothes made from wool, polyester and nylon are less susceptible to wrinkling.
Clothes made from cotton and linen become wrinkled because of water. These materials have their polymers linked via hydrogen bonds which of course also hold water molecules together. When water molecules enter the area between the polymer chains, new hydrogen bonds are created. When the water starts to evaporate during the drying process, the new fibre shape created stays locked in. This is why steam irons are the best solution for clothes made from linen and cotton.
How to Prevent Wrinkles in Clothes
Before putting clothes in the dryer, have some white vinegar on hand to place into the machine during its rinse cycle. This is an effective way of ensuring clothes stay wrinkle-free once they come out of the dryer. Of course, you should also make sure that clothes which have just been dried are hung up immediately. As the scientific explanations above proved, allowing clothes to remain in bundles is the worst thing you can do when trying to prevent wrinkles.
A quick tip to remove wrinkles from clothes that are already dry is to place them on a hanger in the bathroom while you are having a shower. The steam should remove most if not all of the wrinkles in the clothes. A slightly stranger option is to place the clothes in a dryer for 10 minutes with a clean wet sock. The sock should provide the necessary moisture while the dryer will add the heat needed to remove wrinkles from the clothes.
