You've probably been taught to send your used and soiled clothes to the cleaners after wearing them or to do your laundry regularly, in keeping with a good hygiene and maintaining cleanliness, but a denim expert said you can forget about washing jeans altogether. Why? Because you're only ruining the jeans' quality if you keep tossing them in the laundry.
Levi Strauss' CEO Chip Bergh revealed in a video interview with Fortune magazine that he's not in the habit of washing his jeans and he hasn't had any skin problems because of it. "It was a wake-up call to consumers that we go into autopilot and after we're finished wearing something, we just automatically toss it into the laundry," Bergh said, according to Independent. He also pointed out that washing ruins the jeans' material and you'll also end up wasting water on something that don't really need to be cleaned with laundry soap and water.
Jeans manufacturer Huit Denim agrees with Bergh and stated jeans are better when they are left unwashed, according to its official site. However, if you're more comfortable wearing jeans that have been cleaned, Huit Denim suggests waiting six months after using it. The company also offered the following advise to cleaning jeans:
1) Freezing the jeans overnight as the cold will kill the bacteria.
2) Let them air out when the sun is bright, as air and sunlight can work as natural neutralizers.
3) Spot cleaning the areas that have dirty marks, which Bergh also suggested. "Simply spot clean your jeans if they aren't a total mess," he wrote on Huffington Post. "And, when my jeans really need a wash, I do it the old fashioned way: I hand-wash them and hang-dry them."
If you're still worried about bacteria despite these suggestions, perhaps you can take comfort in this 2011 study conducted by microbiologist from the University of Alberta. The scientist had not washed his jeans for 15 months and tested them for any bacteria against another pair that was washed after two weeks of wearing. Both jeans had the normal amounts of bacteria present and they are hardly harmful.
