You pay good money to have your shirts laundered, so you don't expect to get them back with stains on the collar tips. But it happens, and quite frequently, it turns out.
I find the spots on a lot of my well-made brand-name dress shirts. If this happens to you, don't blame the dry cleaner. The problem is how those shirts were made.
An adhesive is often used to hold the fabric together before the collar is sewn. The experts at the Dry Cleaning and Laundry Institute tell me that glue cannot stand up to the heat used at a commercial laundry.
And when the shirt hits the hot press of a commercial laundry press, that glue dissolves and it leaches through and stains the outer fabric and leaves the dark little spot or mark wherever that glue was.
On white or light colored shirts, the stain is usually yellow, rust or light gray.
On blue or darker shirts, the stain normally looks like a dark spot or shiny area. Once again, the price or quality of the shirt does not matter; it's whether that glue is used.
And experts say once a stain appears, it's permanent.
Even if you use special solvents, it won't come out. That's because that heat melted the glue and it's now bound up to the fabric, both inside and out.
The folks at the Dry Cleaning and Laundry Institute had one more thing they wanted to share - the dry cleaner has no way to know, in advance, if there's glue in that collar, and no way to prevent the damage once that shirt hits a hot press.
Again, as I said before, it's annoying, it's frustrating. And I would hope the big companies that sell these shirts would do something about it.
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