How do detergents that improve the clothes’ colour actually work? How is it possible without the actual dye?

666 views

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

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

You are viewing 1 out of 3 answers, click here to view all answers.