The Wash Guide

Writer

Nick Townsend

Founder and editor

Nick Townsend started The Wash Guide with a question he assumed had an answer: how do you wash this?

What he found instead was folklore. Care labels nobody can read, advice passed down through families that contradicts the advice passed down through other families, and a general sense that everyone else had been handed a manual he’d somehow missed. The more he dug, the clearer it got: not that people were doing it wrong, but that nobody had ever been properly taught. Including him.

That realisation shaped the product. The Wash Guide doesn’t scold, doesn’t break your streak, doesn’t rank you last. It works on the idea that people change their habits when they recognise themselves in something, not when they’re made to feel behind. Under the surface it’s a data problem: patterns, drift, the small inflection points where a habit actually turns. On the surface it should just feel like someone finally explained it.

Pieces
7
Writing since
Most recent

How I work

You should not have to take my word for any of this. Every piece lists its sources at the foot, so you can go and check the ones you doubt. Where the honest answer is that nobody knows, you get that instead of a number. And if something here turns out to be wrong, it comes out rather than quietly staying up. That has happened twice so far.

Writing

  1. The thinkingMost of laundry happens between washes.The wash is the smallest part of looking after clothes. What you do in the days between decides how often you need it, which is why a schedule is a starting point rather than a rule.
  2. How oftenHow often should you actually wash your bedsheets?Weekly is one of the better-supported numbers in laundry. Two of the figures people repeat about beds are not, including one of ours, and the pillowcase matters more than the rest of the set put together.
  3. How oftenHow often should you actually wash your towels?Less often than the frightening numbers suggest, and it depends far more on how the towel dries than on how many times you have used it. What is actually growing, what a microbiologist says about it, and why fabric conditioner is the real culprit.
  4. How oftenHow often should you actually wash your jeans?There is no honest number, and the three camps that will give you one are each answering a different question. What the evidence supports, why the freezer does nothing, and why never washing costs you the jeans.
  5. How oftenHow often should you actually wash your bras?The interval is the easy half. What decides whether a bra still fits in a year is whether it gets a day off, and the instinct to wash it as little as possible is quietly destroying it.
  6. How oftenHow often should you actually wash your gym clothes?Every wear, and not for the reason you have been given. The smell is an oil rather than a germ, polyester holds on to it, and the wash does not fully take it out again.
  7. How oftenHow often should you actually wash your pillows?Half of them should never be submerged at all, and the frightening statistics driving people to wash them turn out to have no study behind them. Which pillows can go in, what to do with the ones that cannot, and why the drying is the dangerous part.