White clothes are bourgeoisie decadence to signal they do not work manual jobs.

One of my favorite shirts is Trashfuture’s “What if we made the Soviet Union but shitty and expensive” shirt but it only comes in white and keeping it stain free has been a fucking battle

Here’s basic laundry advice:

Try not to let a stain dry, if possible. If it stays wet it will be easier to treat.

Carefully scrape or rinse off any excess stuff, if there is any.

Wash asap.

Avoid using anything too acidic on the stain because, depending on a whole lot of factors, this can act as a fixative that makes the stain bond to the fabric.

Avoid heat with washing/drying as this can help to set the stain. This is especially important with protein-heavy stains - if you denature the protein you basically cook it into the fibres of your fabric and it gets extremely difficult to remove. Think about the difference between rinsing uncooked egg from a pan vs trying to remove egg that has stuck and cooked onto a pan. Now imagine that but in a three-dimensional weave.

As general advice, you can spot treat stains by applying laundry powder or liquid directly onto a pre-wetted patch and work it in before putting it through the wash as per usual. Just check the directions on what you put in your washing machine to be sure - some have optical brighteners or bleach mixed in that may cause discoloration if you do this.

Be persistent - sometimes it just takes a few rounds of pre-treatment and a few cycles through the washing machine to get something to budge.

Now for the more complicated stuff:

Oil and grease stains work best with spot treatment and heat because you basically want to soften up the oils and encourage them to lather up so they will break down and be removed. These can be stubborn but they don’t really require anything beyond persistence.

Laundry soak that is predominantly sodium percarbonate will be very useful for removing stains, especially when you’re talking coloured stains from red wine or tomato sauce or whatever. Sodium percarbonate requires hot water to activate, so if you’re using cold water with sodium percarbonate you’re probably wasting time and resources for very little outcome. I prefer to use it as a pre-soak prior to washing but you can add it directly to the wash however you’re not going to get the best results that way. If you have to wear whites as a uniform or whatever, regularly adding this into your whites wash can help maintain the brightness of the clothes. You can spot-treat with sodium percarbonate but I’m not a big fan of this because it requires careful consideration and application - it can definitely work but you need to know what you’re doing.

Waxy substances are an absolute pain to remove. Often this is going to require laying your fabric on scrap fabric and applying heat through a steamer or an iron and blotting/scraping the gunk off. Good luck!

For things like chewing gum and many glues, products containing D-limonene are really useful but you need to be careful depending on the fabric you’re using it on.

For superglue, use acetone.

For rust or metal-based stains, if I’m certain that’s what it is or if I’ve eliminated other potential candidates first, I would use an acid. Vinegar is fine, you could probably get good results with a paste made of citric acid, or there are certain heavier duty cleaning sprays that use stronger acids but I’d resort to them as a last ditch effort and I’d minimise the time the fabric spends in contact with strong acids because it may risk damage. If you have stains on your armpits from deodorant - that’s usually a build-up of mostly alum and working an acid into these stains should break it down effectively although if they are major stains then it’s probably going to require a few rounds of treatment.

Enzymes can be useful but there’s zero fucking regulation on them so I’m skeptical about how much of them a product contains, or even if they’re the right ones for the job. I’d be astonished if drycleaners don’t have access to individual enzyme concentrates or blends that are actually effective but I’d be equally astonished if most domestic laundry products don’t just add in the absolute minimum quantity of the cheapest enzyme, say lipase (Wow great - now the warm water and laundry detergent I normally wash my clothes in will also remove oils! Truly a miracle of modern science!), to their product so they can slap a “With Stain-Busting Enzymes!!” on the label and mark the price up by 10 or 20 percent despite it being so insignificant a quantity that it wouldn’t actually do fuck all in practice. I mean, go for it if you want to and especially if you’ve heard good reports about a particular product but also remember that it’s largely just marketing hype.

Here’s what I’d do for most stains:

• Make mental note of what caused the stain

• Wash immediately/rinse off stain immediately/scrape off excess material carefully (in order of priority - obviously you can’t just whip your shirt off in the middle of a restaurant)

• (If you can’t wash immediately) Spot treat the stain before putting it through the wash

• Dry on a low heat

• Assess the situation once the fabric is dried

• Consider using a sodium percarbonate pre-soak before washing again if you are unsatisfied with the progress so far

• If there has been little progress by this stage, I’d start getting serious about using specific cleaning products and seeking out directions for the particular type of stain it is/it’s likely to be

Remember to follow your fabric’s cleaning instructions and that all of this is just general advice. That expensive silk dress that you got a stain on? Don’t go ruining it based on what I’ve written above since not all of the advice is suitable for such a delicate fabric, just take it to a professional dry cleaner.

Pretty sure it’s the stain goblins at work. All the symptoms are there. Have you considered hiring an adventurer?

Relevant Corb Lund song:

It’s Hard To Keep A White Shirt Clean