Levi’s CEO Says You’re Washing Your Jeans Too Often

Some clothing brands advise not to wash your jeans more than necessary and, above all, to avoid washing them in the washing machine. In recent years, one of the people most responsible for raising awareness about this has been the CEO of Levi’s. Charles Berg. According to him, ideally wash only spots and if your pants are completely sweaty, wash them by hand. But this is only if there is no other choice.

Don’t wash jeans brings quite a lot of benefits. For starters, given the huge carbon emissions and water consumption involved in producing these clothes, the less they are washed, the easier it will be to offset that environmental damage. But also, if you don’t wash them, they colors and textures longer. Especially in the so-called raw denim. That is, jeans sewn in their natural form, without processing or pre-washing.

Okay, so it’s clear that not washing your jeans can have many benefits. But isn’t it dirty? This question was asked in 2009 by a student University of Alberta who, together with one of his teachers, decided to conduct a most interesting scientific experiment. Basically, it took same jeans for 15 months, sometimes without taking them off even before bed. The results may have been disgusting, but they were actually quite surprising.

False risks of not washing jeans

This University of Alberta student, Josh LeI wanted to know what happens if you don’t wash your jeans for a long time.

To do this, in 2009, he took pants recently purchased and started using them day after day for 15 months. He even slept with them for a month. At that time, although he observed the rules of hygiene, he limited himself to jeans only remove stains from the surface. For example, if I spilled some sauce on them, I wiped it up with a paper towel. Nothing more.

To avoid the smell, he put them in freezer once every two weeks, and this was the only treatment he subjected them to. After 15 months his textile science teacher Rachel McQueentook several samples from the surface of the pants and analyzed them for the presence of bacteria.

After this Le could wash jeans in the washing machine and start using them again, day after day, for two weeks.

McQueen then took the samples again and compared the bacterial populations to those measured before the wash. So he saw that the numbers of bacteria were very similar. In particular, there was 8,000 to 10,000 colony-forming units per square centimeter in the perineal area, from 1500 to 2500 on your back and from 1000 to 2000 in the front. As for the composition, there were no significant differences either.

In fact, as the professor explained in her statement, she expected to find some bacteria from the inside of the intestine, such as coli. Although they regularly coexist with us, their accumulation can lead to diseases. But they were not found. The vast majority of bacteria found on pants in both the first part of the experiment and the second came from wool Le. These skin bacteria are completely harmless, so the student was never in danger.

Can we copy the experiment?

What this student did is clearly extreme event. Jeans should not be left unwashed for 15 months. Much less if we use them every day.

Freezing, although it worked, does little to prevent bacterial growthWhether it is harmless or not, the smell becomes inevitable. But it’s true that this experiment shows that we can wash jeans much less than we usually do. Of course, not after every use. If they don’t sweat much and are fine, they can probably even be left on for a few weeks with regular use.

Now, if there are stains or we find an unpleasant odor in certain parts of the trousers, they should be washed. At least wash these parts.

The main thing is to achieve balance. Washing your jeans on a regular basis greatly minimizes the amount of water and energy spent on making them. We will give back to the planet what we take from it. So this is an interesting measure. But we can’t get inside either. Let’s reduce the amount of washing we do so that our pants don’t greet us in the morning and don’t stand up when we take them off. In the medium term, this is a virtue.