I recently came across a product called Vanish Miracle that claims to improve the colour of the clothes. There’s even a hash tag on Instagram and the results that people have are pretty amazing. I remember that years ago there were similar products but only for white or black clothes.
How do they actually work? I understand that for whites it might be bleach, but making a yellow shirt be more yellow or a red scarf be more red seems magical. What’s the secret?
In: Chemistry
I can’t recall what class it was in but my prof got into a bit of a side discussion which involved telling us about old detergents that were designed to make whites look whiter by adding a tint of blue because it actually looks more clean and vibrantly white than an actually pure-white shirt. He explained the reasoning but I can’t remember it fully other than having something to do with natural light and our perception of colour.
Some manufacturers will add an optical brightener to the formula. These basically glow under UV/sunlight just like some paints do under black lights. The effect is subtle when you have normal light levels, and it just looks.. “brighter”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_brightener
There are also detergents marketed for black clothes. The trick there is just to avoid all of the brightening and bleaching, and maybe even weaken the detergent a bit so that it fades less.
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