Imagine…
It’s 12am. Your bag of dirty gym clothes is staring at you from the corner of your bedroom. Heaving a sigh, you rub your eyes and head to the laundry machine, open the lid, and grab your bottle of fabric softener…
No, this isn’t the beginning of a script for a horror movie -
BUTT it is the stuff of nightmares!
What? Why?
Yes, fabric softener was God’s gift to the scratchy wool sweaters that we all got for Christmas. However, this is not true for your athletic apparel, including our shorties!
Our shorties are made of the perfect blend of performance fabrics in order to keep the sweat off your booty and give you freedom of movement - essential for squatting low and aiming high.
Polyester, nylon, and spandex have wicking and stretching capabilities because they are permeable, meaning they move that hard earned sweat away from your bod. However, adding fabric softener (liquid or dryer sheet)coats the material with wax. That waxy wall seals in sweat and bacteria, making it hard for laundry detergents to really get the shorties clean - rendering them both smelly and ineffective. Gross.
Here’s some more reasons to avoid fabric softener…
- Because of the product that helps remove static in liquid fabric softener, it can make clothing more flammable. Not the 🔥🔥🔥we were going for...
- If you have sensitive skin, fabric softener can cause inflammation. The horror!
- They aren’t biodegradable and are transferred directly into our water systems. They can be toxic to aquatic life and since it is LITERALLY in the water...yeah you get it. Save the planet and your shorties!
So what can you do instead?
Don’t despair! There are ways to wash/dry your shorties that will reduce stiffness and static without all the negative effects of fabric softener!
- Air Dry you Shorties- it’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s effective!
- Try Dryer Balls- these are little balls of wool that you stick in the dryer to help reduce static. You can add some essential oils directly to the balls to give them a fresh scent.
So whether you bedeck your booty with WodBottom shorties, or any other athletic brand (we prefer WodBottom...objectively speaking), skip the fabric softeners and dryer sheets. We promise you’ll be the SCENTer of attention in a good way.
Meet the Author: Katie, a Luther College graduate, joined the bootyfull world of WodBottom in 2019. She loves to write and has even been published one or two times! She is passionate about women’s issues and really enjoys sharing the ways women’s athletic clothing has been, and still is, a feminist statement with our readers.
