Tips For Fighting “The Fade” And Keeping Black Clothes Black

(NAPSA)—Black is always a fashion staple; faded black rarely makes the list. Whether it’s a dark pair of jeans or a little black top, black is the color that hits the streets season after season. While finding the basic black wardrobe essentials is as easy as a trip to the local mall, keeping those black fabrics brilliant can be more of a chore. If you think the washing machine routine is a losing battle, think again. There are a number of ways to help keep your family’s clothes vibrant. While nothing can bring back the original color of a favorite black garment that has faded, there are ways to fight “the fade” before it starts. Selecting a laundry detergent specially formulated to help keep colors where they belong is a step in the right direction.

Next time you go to wash a load of laundry, make sure your detergent is as smart as you are. Following are some simple tips from the makers of Cheer to help lengthen the life of your black
clothing and colored garments. Chlorine: Not Just In Your Pool We all know the damage that chlorine in a swimming pool can do to your bathing suit. Chlorine in wash water can have the same effect over time. For people who live in the city, chlorinated water is a fact of life. Use a detergent that neutralizes the chlorine in wash water to help keep your black and colored clothing from fading with a special chlorine scavenger agent. The chlorine scavenger agents bond with free chlorine molecules, neutralizing them before they fade fabrics.

Clothes Go ’Round, Color Stays As garments spin around the washing machine, the fabric dyes can spin off onto other clothes in the wash. Cheer contains a dyefixing agent that traps colors to help reduce fading and keep colors from settling back on other garments in the wash load. Fuzzy Is Not Fun Fighting “the fade” means fighting the fuzz too. Look for a detergent with specialized ingredients to prevent cotton fibers from loosening. Cheer powder has a revolutionary technology that interweaves through cotton yarns and helps prevent the cotton fibers from pulling away and forming fuzz. This helps keeps clothes like new and colors vibrant.

Don’t Let “The Fade” Get You Down
Laundry statistics brought to you by Cheer detergent*
• One in five parents with laundry problems say their biggest dilemma is keeping black clothes from fading.
• 13 percent of parents cite fabrics getting fuzzy and 6 percent cite fabrics bleeding onto other articles of clothing as their biggest laundry challenges.
• Three in ten parents describe their children as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” about their laundry—they are most concerned with a few, favorite clothing items.
• More than half of surveyed parents of boys age 9-17 said that their son will be wearing dark blue or black jeans often this year.
• Seven in ten parents of girls said that their daughter will wear dark blue or black jeans often this year. In addition, one out of three said that black capri pants would be a staple of their daughter’s wardrobe this year.
• Most parents of children age 9-17 don’t know whom their teens/tweens are trying to look like. However, of those parents in-the-know, 70 percent said their sons look to Tony Hawke for fashion guidance and 44 percent said their daughters want to look like the Olson twins.
*Harris Interactive conducted a QuickQuerySM online onmibus national survey of 2,303 adults. Results are based on the 327 adults with children age 9-17. The margin of error for this sample is +/-5.4 percent.