I recently came across a product called Vanish Miracle that claims to improve the colour of the clothes. There’s even a hash tag on Instagram and the results that people have are pretty amazing. I remember that years ago there were similar products but only for white or black clothes.
How do they actually work? I understand that for whites it might be bleach, but making a yellow shirt be more yellow or a red scarf be more red seems magical. What’s the secret?
In: Chemistry
Some manufacturers will add an optical brightener to the formula. These basically glow under UV/sunlight just like some paints do under black lights. The effect is subtle when you have normal light levels, and it just looks.. “brighter”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_brightener
There are also detergents marketed for black clothes. The trick there is just to avoid all of the brightening and bleaching, and maybe even weaken the detergent a bit so that it fades less.
I can’t recall what class it was in but my prof got into a bit of a side discussion which involved telling us about old detergents that were designed to make whites look whiter by adding a tint of blue because it actually looks more clean and vibrantly white than an actually pure-white shirt. He explained the reasoning but I can’t remember it fully other than having something to do with natural light and our perception of colour.
I was wondering the same thing few days ago. All these “for black”/“for coloured” detergents that claim to make blacks blacker and coloured more colourful. Also will “for coloured” make black more black too?
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