June 26, 2025
You may see a lot of dry cleaners in your town and have friends and family who religiously use dry cleaning for every garment. That person may even be you. But what really is dry cleaning?
So you ship off your ‘nicer’ clothes to this mysterious place where you aren’t really sure what is done to them, but they return crisp and clean. Let’s unveil the ambiguity of the dry cleaners.
A Brief History
It all started with the Greeks and Romans, who used powdered chemicals and absorbent clay to remove stains from garments. Later, in the mid-1800s, a French dye-works operator created a solution with kerosene and gasoline. As you can imagine, this concoction raised some serious flammability concerns. Thankful we moved forward and, after World War I, created chlorinated solvents that were no longer a fire hazard, but they were pretty toxic to humans and the environment. Along came the mid-1930s when the dry cleaning industry started using tetrachloroethylene, or perc, which was nonflammable, nontoxic, and readily recyclable.
The Process of Dry Cleaning
Dry cleaning works because it is the process of using organic solvents to eliminate soils and stains from fabrics. The stains of your silk and cashmere also won’t come out in a traditional washing machine because the solvents need to be present to beat the stains. The science behind this? Simply put, the clothes are soaked in a non-polar water-free liquid solvent. Water itself is a solvent, meaning other items dissolve in it. This particular solvent repels water. Next, the solvent is extracted, and thanks to modern machines, almost 99.99% of the solvent can be removed from the clothes for reuse. The crispiness you experience after picking up your fresh clothes is a result of steaming, pressing, and ironing after the dry cleaning.
The Benefits of Dry Cleaning
You can think of dry cleaning as a return on your investment. Your nice clothes are sent to the dry cleaner so that they last longer and don’t come unraveled in the wash. Your silk and cashmere items wouldn’t last a few spin cycles with bulky towels or rough jeans. The only way you can really make these last is by bringing them to a dry cleaner.
But not just this, dry cleaning gives your clothes a deeper refresh than washing alone. Have you ever taken a shirt out of the dryer and it still smells mildewy or dirty? The process of dry cleaning actually completely removes the odor from clothes.
If you are still curious about our process or are looking for a dry cleaning service, please reach out to us at 843-532-3318.
