While many of your friends and coworkers may like and enjoy cannabis, not everyone may like its smell and aroma as much as you do. In fact, even you may get tired of the dank smell wafting from your clothes hours or even days after that smoke sesh.
Luckily, there are a number of effective ways you can eliminate the scent of cannabis from your clothes. After all, the industry is filled with a million odor-reducing cleaning products and detergents, and many of them work quite well. But then, so do several home remedies.
Don’t just head out to the supermarket yet. You may just have the solution at home.
Methods for removing cannabis smell
Laundry detergent
Seems obvious right? I mean, if your clothes start smelling, you wash them. But if you want to completely get rid of the smell, you might just want to understand how laundry detergents work.
Most detergents clean clothes by using something called “surface-active agents”. These agents “thin” the water, and allow it to reach deeper into the clothing and rinse away the oil, hair, food, etc. that may be stuck there. In a perfect world, this should be enough. But, often it isn’t, and we must turn to other solutions as well.
Baking soda
Also known as bicarbonate soda, baking soda is quite commonly used to get rid of food smells from the fridge or the back of your cupboards. And when you were young, you might have poured vinegar or coca-cola into it to make a fuzzy volcano.
Luckily, baking soda is also a useful cleaning agent. Just soak your clothes in warm water with a cup of baking soda for an hour. And then, you can wash your clothes like you normally do. The baking soda should carry all the odorous and smelly molecules down the drain.
Vinegar
If you frequently hit the gym, you may already be adding vinegar to your wash. This common household acid is great at cleaning a lot of things, and laundry is no different. So you can either soak your clothes in a mixture of vinegar and water before or simply pour some vinegar in while your machine is rinsing them.
Activated carbon
Activated carbon or activated charcoal is also a useful cleaning and filtering agent and can be found in many places. For example, the water filter in your fridge is charcoal-based.
Due to the fact that it is full of microscopic holes, activated carbon allows gas to flow through it, and everything that is in the gas adheres to the surface of the carbon. So if you want, you can toss some carbon in a plastic bag, and soak it and your clothes in warm water before washing them. Be advised, if some of it gets loose, your clothes may look like they have black dye on them. Don’t worry because luckily, carbon washes off quite easily.
Fresh air and sunshine
Like some stains, odor-producing molecules can also sometimes bond with the fabric, especially if you try to dry them at high heat. To avoid this, you may just wanna dry at a lower heat setting, or hang your clothes outside. The fresh air will blow away any naturally occurring scents, while the low heat will prevent the molecules from bonding to the fabric.
The best solution is prevention
Ever wonder why some experienced stoners like to smoke bare-chested? Well, there might be more than one reason for it, but it sure does prevent your clothes from absorbing the smell. You could also try some edibles instead!