How to Decipher Universal Care Labels

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Rachel and I'm a freelance fashion journalist and the owner of Austin Style Watch.com street fashion site and I'm here with you today to talk about deciphering universal care labels. Now, universal care labels are something you might find on a garment and it will have some little symbols. Now, a lot of times today theres pretty simple written instructions on how to care for your garment but a lot of pieces still use these symbols and we're going to help you figure out what those mean when it comes to washing your outfit. Now here are the main basic symbols you'll see. This one means wash. This one means bleach. This is tumble dry. This is dry; Iron and dry clean. Seems pretty simple - gets a little bit harder. So within wash, sometimes you'll see hands coming into that wash. Pretty naturally, that means we're going to hand wash the item. But beyond that we also have different load settings. So we have permanent press with one line under it and with two lines, it's delicate and the same also goes for the tumble drying. If we have one line under it, it's permanent press. Two lines under it, it's delicate. Within that we also have the settings of heat. So, regular heat...high heat and same goes for your tumble dry. Now within our bleach, if it's an item that needs non chlorinated bleach (which is a very important thing to remember. I've had clothes turned bizarre colors by it), you're going to look for this symbol. It's going to be your regular bleach triangle but it's going to have some little lines through it. Now let's see what else do we have here...We can also have do not tumble dry, which is going to be one with an 'X' through it or we can also have one that's just representing no heat. And that's just going to be the circle blocked out on it. We can also have don't iron and don't dry clean. Within the dry, there's also some sub sections of drip dry and dry flat and then also dry in the shade. So, this is your basic universal care label instructions and good luck deciphering them on your garment."