Clothes tend to naturally yellow over time. Since most big brand laundry detergents are fighting to provide you with the "brightest and whitest" clothes, they've had to devise ways to counteract this natural occurrence. What's their solution? Optical brighteners.
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These optical brighteners are designed to trick your eyes into thinking that your clothes are less yellow than they actually are. This happens because they are actually dyes in most commercial laundry detergents that alter the way clothes reflect light.
If you remember your science lessons, light is made up of a color spectrum. The optical brighteners absorb the ultraviolet light and give off light in the blue region of the light spectrum. The blue light negates the yellow tinge to the clothing and tricks your eye into thinking that the fabric looks whiter. It also makes the clothes look brighter because it gives off more visible light.
In the “old days” people used to use “bluing” (a blue dye) for the same effect. The blue color somewhat canceled out the yellow tinge and made the clothes appear white.
Optical brighteners may be known by other names such as brightening agents, fluorescent bleaches, optical whiteners, fluorescent brighteners, or fluorescent whiteners. Regardless of what they are called, they are made up of different chemical compounds.
Laundry detergents do not list what chemicals they use and in fact, may not include the fact that they use optical brighteners on their ingredient list at all.
1. They’re designed to bind to the clothing and remain. If you were able to rinse them off, they wouldn’t be doing their job. Because they remain on your clothing and sheets, they come into regular contact with your skin. This is not healthy for your skin and can cause rashes, irritations, and sensitivities compared to the safety of a natural laundry soap.
2. They are not readily biodegradable. Therefore they can be harmful to fish and other animals and plants.
3. They can also cause your clothes to feel stiff unless fluffed in the dryer or washed with a fabric softener. Laundry washed without optical brighteners will feel much softer even if line dried.
4. Long term effects are still not known. Since they can cause issues in people with skin irritation and sensitivities, it should still be avoided.
Another interesting fact is that if you wash clothes with detergents using optical brighteners, you can put them under a black light and they will actually glow. For this reason, we’ve been told that military personnel are not supposed to wash their uniforms with any detergents using optical brighteners because it makes their uniforms highly visible with night vision goggles.
Detergents that use optical brighteners make the fabric stiffer, can be irritating to your skin, are bad for the environment, and do not even make your clothes any cleaner. Your eyes may think your clothes are cleaner, but it’s just an optical illusion.
Instead of chemical-laden detergents with optical brighteners, Goat Milk Stuff makes a goat milk laundry soap that is a healthier and safer way to clean your clothes. The laundry soap makes your clothes look and feel clean without relying on optical illusions.
The Goat Milk Stuff Laundry Soap is available in 3 sizes so you can find the best amount to suit your needs. We offer it in a Trial Size, a Standard Size and a Refill Size. If you've never used a natural laundry soap in powder form before, we recommend starting with the Trial Size.
The Trial Size and Standard Size make wonderful gift options. The Refill Size is the perfect size if you love our Laundry Soap and want to stock up at the best possible price.
We also make a Goat Milk Laundry Stain Stick. This powerful little stick lifts stubborn stains from tomato sauce to grass stains. In fact, we haven't found a stain the Stain Stick doesn't work on yet!
Did you know that many of the products you use every day contain optical brighteners?
Optical brightening agents are chemicals that manufacturers add to products like paper, plastics, and textiles to make them appear whiter and brighter, and to lessen the natural yellowing process that happens over time. They also add these chemicals to cleaning agents to enhance the appearance of materials – primarily textiles – after cleaning.
Often unacknowledged by the typical consumer, OBAs trick our eyes into seeing a brighter white. To understand how they work, read on. We’ll dig into light-object relationships, the primary reason behind this brighter than white phenomenon.
When you say you’re traveling at the speed of light….
You’re traveling at 299,792,458 meters (approximately 3.00×108 m/s) per second. As oscillating energy, light has a spectrum of frequencies, too. Like TV or radio signals, light oscillates, and can have many different frequencies. It is the frequency of light that creates a sensation of color.
This is the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared energy, microwaves, and radio waves all work at lower frequencies and fall to the left of the visible spectrum. To the right, at higher frequencies, are ultraviolet energy, x-rays, and gamma rays.
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The visible spectrum, shown below, is the light that we can see with the naked eye. Since it’s the only part of the spectrum we can visualize, many of us consider it all-encompassing, but it’s really just a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
And you thought your pillowcase was blue…
Wrong! Objects themselves don’t have color… they have dyes, colorants, or pigments that absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others. The color you perceive is the color of the light that is reflected off of the object.
Take this car, for instance. It’s bright red in the sunlight, but its color seemingly changes to a deep burgundy in the nighttime.
See how the color of the car changes depending on the type of light that is shining on it? The “cleanest” red is at noon.
Close your eyes, and picture a clear, blue day. Although you’re likely picturing a picnic in a park or at the beach, this reflectance curve, below, provides another way to describe what a clear, blue day looks like. Displayed through frequencies, we can see that there is an abundance of energy across the entire visible spectrum, and a clear bias towards the blue.
A clean as white as snow
It’s the goal of cleaning products everywhere. Manufacturers achieve this bright – almost blue – white by adding optical brighteners that are transferred to fabrics during washing.
So how does this difference in white look as a reflectance curve?
As we discussed, colors have different wavelengths. This graph shows the reflectance curves of black, blue, green, gray, red, and white.
A few things stand out.
The black reflectance curve is flat near the bottom with a low reflectance percentage. While the white curve is also flat, it sits at the very top with a high reflectance. Why is this?
Think of a dark room. If there’s no light shining, everything appears to be black. If there is a lot of light, the objects are bright, white, and sometimes even hard to see because there is so much reflectance.
Gray is hanging out in the middle with pretty equal amounts of each color, neither bright nor dark.
Blue, green, and red are peaked in their respective colors, perfect demonstrations of how reflectance curves align with the visual spectrum. High red peak = high concentration of red light.
Watch what happens to the white curve when we add optical brightening agents….
See how the peak rises in the blue area?
OBAs absorb light from the ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can’t see, and re-emit that light in the blue region where we can see it. Our eyes will perceive this white to be brighter than the white that doesn’t contain optical brighteners.
Taking the good with the bad
Although OBAs help manufacturers sell more products, they make it very difficult to control color because the optical brightening content can only be seen under light sources that contain UV. Before assembling products with pieces from different suppliers, manufacturers need to evaluate the amount of optical brighteners in each to ensure consistency after final consistency and under all of the lighting conditions the product will be exposed to out in the world.
Take these shirts for example…
A manufacturer sewed them using fabric from different suppliers. Although they appear to be the same color white in daylight, as soon as the ultraviolet light is flipped on you can see they are quite different. This is a phenomenon called “metamerism” – when two things appear to match under one light source, but no longer match when you change the lighting.