How To Keep Your Bed Linens Bright White Without Using Bleach

Keeping your bed linens white is one of life's biggest challenges. When you first get them from the store, they're so crisp and white, instantly making your bedroom feel like an oasis. But as you use them day in and day out, they get dingy yellow stains from body oils, sweat, and drool. This instantly brings down the mood in the room, making it feel less like a relaxing retreat and more like a dirty motel. But keeping them spot-free doesn't have to be hard, and you don't even have to use bleach. Instead, all you need is Dawn dish soap to pre-treat those marks.

People want to cut bleach from their cleaning routines for a bevy of reasons, whether that's because they want to use more eco-friendly products or don't want to accidentally endanger any kids or pets in the house. And luckily for us, bleach isn't the only cleaning agent that can remove stains. A certain dishwashing soap can also help. Here's how to brighten your whites without using bleach.

It can be tough to keep linens white without the help of bleach. If you have tried hacks like using baking soda or Borax to whiten your loads, then you probably know those don't always work. But there is one trick that involves using Dawn dish soap that might finally get your linen closet looking right.

All you need to do is grab your sheets and pillowcases and look for any telltale yellow stains. If you find them, grab a bottle of blue Dawn dish soap, and apply a few drops to the stains. Use your finger to spread the soap around the entire blotch, and give it a few minutes to settle in. Then add a bit of water and begin scrubbing the spot. This should pretreat the stain. Pop it into the washing machine, and it should disappear by the time you take your linens out.

However, keep in mind that it's only safe to use a few drops of dish soap to pretreat stains. You should not add dish soap to your machine the way you would add laundry detergent. That's because it's specially formulated to sud, creating a large amount of bubbles. Detergent doesn't bubble the same way, mainly because if it did, it would damage the laundry machine by overworking the drain pipe. The pipe will have to continually kick on to remove the suds, which can burn it out or cause it to catch on fire. 

Dawn dish soap is specially formulated to break down grease and oil, which is what makes it such a powerhouse in the kitchen. You have probably noticed that washing a greasy pan with Dawn is much easier than its generic counterpart, and that same method applies to your laundry. Folks often use it to spot-treat all sorts of stains on their clothes — from pasta sauce splatters to stubborn oil splotches — and using it to whiten your linens just takes that concept to the next level.

Our sheets and towels yellow because of a buildup of body oil and sweat, making them an unattractive faded color. Since Dawn is the cleaning tool to cut through grease, it works overtime in the washing machine to strip your sheets of residue. It helps cut through what your regular detergent can't, giving it a boost of power.

But that's not all. This hack is also effective because of the bright blue color of the soap. The cool color helps counteract the yellow discoloration in the linen by embedding itself into the fabric. This gives it a barely-visible blue tint, making us register it as a whiter product.