Tag Archives: clean smelly t-shirts

How Do I Get the Smell Out of My T-Shirt?

Over time, anyone can end up with a t-shirt that smells bad and resists your attempts to get the smell out of it. The smell can occur because of excessive sweat, the odor of food or the specific smells of the workplace. If the smells don’t come out when the t-shirt is washed with the rest of the laundry, there are several ways to get rid of the offensive smell.

One of the easiest things to do is to hang the t-shirt on a clothesline outdoors to try to rid it of the smell. If you don’t have one, simply hang the shirt over your patio or balcony railing and let the fresh in their blow through your t-shirt. This can go a long way toward giving the t-shirt a fresher smell. Once you have done this, there may be some lingering odors left. If so, you’ll need to soak the t-shirt in something that will lift the odor from the fabric. Using a regular, scented laundry detergent will not necessarily remove the odor. Often, detergents just work to mask the odor with a new fragrance rather than ridding the t-shirt of it. So, when the detergent fragrance wears off, the bad odor is left behind. There are several substances that will rid the t-shirt of its odor without simply masking it.

Vinegar is a good rinse for a t-shirt that smells. You can use vinegar to soak the t-shirt for a few minutes before washing it in the laundry, or you can add a little bit of vinegar to the laundry detergent in the washer. Vinegar is extremely efficient at stripping odors from fabric. It may end up with a vinegar smell afterward, and the t-shirt may need to be washed again after the vinegar has done its work.

Baking soda is another great substance that can be used to pull the smell from a t-shirt. When mixed with water, it can be used as a presoak for your t-shirt. The shirt should be soaked in a solution for about half an hour and then put into the laundry as usual. Another way to use baking soda is to add a cup of it into the laundry along with the detergent. This can be extremely effective at removing foul odors from laundry.

Another method is to use a fabric softener to absorb the odor. To do this, take the t-shirt and one or two fabric softener sheets, depending on how bad the odor of the t-shirt is, and seal them together in a plastic bag. Keep the t-shirt in the bag with the softeners for two weeks. Once you remove the t-shirt, the fabrics softener sheets will have absorbed most, if not all, of the odor from the t-shirt. If there is any odor left in the shirt, try this method again with brand-new fabric softener sheets. After two weeks, you’ll be left with a sweet smelling t-shirt that has not simply been masked with a fragrance. The offensive odor will actually have been absorbed by the sheets.

How To Remove Odor From T-Shirts

Odors appear in fabrics for a number of reasons. If a person sweats profusely in a T-shirt, that shirt can hold the odor of the sweat. In certain workplaces, there are a variety of chemical odors, food odors or other scents that seem to weave their way into the fabric of a T-shirt and stay there. There are even times when you buy a T-shirt and notice a chemical odor on it that worries you. Unfortunately, you can wash these items over and over but still smell the offending odor, especially when the T-shirt is dry.

Therefore it is very important to many people to be able to remove odors from T-shirts. Luckily there are a variety of techniques that you can try in order to accomplish this goal, all of them being rather easy to do and inexpensive. These techniques however are much more than simply using a nice smelling detergent and fabric softener. Removing odors from T-shirts can take time and multiple steps like when you are removing stains.

When you first discover that your T-shirts have an odor, hang them outside to air out. Just doing this alone can make a huge difference to the smell of your clothes. This is also a good technique to do with new clothes that have a chemical smell. Afterwards, wash them with a cup or more of vinegar added to the wash water in addition to the laundry detergent. To dry, hang them outside again. A pre-soak in sodium bicarbonate and water is also another good odor remover. Another odor booster to add to your wash cycle is a cup of Borax and regular washing soda. Let the clothes sit for several hours or even overnight before washing. This is great on odors but not on the stains that are often the cause of them.

Sodium bicarbonate and vinegar are very effective at getting rid of odors because they do not mask the odor, as a scented laundry detergent might. The chemical reaction caused by their use actually neutralizes the odor. You may use either of these laundry boosters to deal with odors or you may use one at the beginning of the wash cycle and the other during the rinse cycle. However, if you try to use them both at the same time, they will counteract each other.

If you happen to be unlucky enough to get an unpleasant odor in your T-shirt that you cannot get out, the best thing to do is to toss out the shirt and get a new one. If you order a custom-made T-shirt you can get one identical to the one that you cannot get clean. People will never know the difference. They’ll just think you managed to get the funky odor out of your shirt. If you happen to have a job where you are cursed with fabric-permeating odors, use it to your advantage and have a funny T-shirt made up that says “This T-shirt smells just like my workplace.”

Get your custom-made T-shirt today for the optimum odor removal altogether.