Eli5:Why does clothing turn pink in cartoons? I’ve never seen this happen in real life, is it just an exaggeration or is it very much true?
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When you wash clothes the first few times, some of the colouring will bleed into the other clothes. This is why we wash colours together and whites together. If you put something new and red in with your whites, your whites will turn pink
It has definitely happened to me. I had bought a mixed pack of underwear. If I remember right, the colors were black, light grey, navy and dark red. I put them all in the wash together and ended up having to toss the grey ones because they had turned grey-pink.
As other commenters have said, this pretty much only happens the first few times you wash certain colored items though.
Can confirm, did a “college load” with a red t-shirt from fast fashion, tinted my whites a light shade of pink. Cartoons exaggerate how pink, but it was definitely, unmistakably, pink.
This used to happen a lot more than it does now. Better fabrics and dyes mean fewer accidents, but it still occurs occasionally. It used to be a much bigger problem 30 years ago.
If you wash a brightly colored piece of clothing with white clothes in hot water, the color can bleed from the colored fabric to the white fabric. I’ve had this happen to me by accident. You should wash your colors separately from whites, or at least use cold water to avoid color bleeding.
As several have said, it’s not as common as it once was. If you’d like to do this yourself though, you can! Visit an auto shop and buy new ‘red shop rags’, put in washer with anything you want to be a soft brick red color. The shop rags will shed color for the next 6 washes (or more) so don’t wash then with anything you DON’T want pink!
My sister and I do this intentionally so our shop shower/camping towels (the old rag towels that don’t go upstairs into the nice part of the house) are easily identified. If you’re wanting to ruin someone’s laundry, only use one shop rag. That should make everything a soft pink, and no, washing the load again won’t get the color back out.
My grandmother was staying with us one time and she lived in an apartment and would wash everything together to save money at the laundromat. There was a red shirt in with my blue jeans and it turned every pair if jeans and shorts I had a soft shade of pink. We couldn’t afford to replace them so that’s just what I wore.
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