Notes from Janice’s Desk
I love blackberries but seem to always drop them on my clothes. Actually, I am worse than a small child when it comes to staining my clothes with the foods I eat.This means that I have lots of clothes that have food stains on them.
While researching food stains I discovered that dyes are attracted to the chemicals in the material they come in contact with and stain. Sometimes the dye actually combines with the chemicals and you can forget about removing the stain. But, some dyes just weave in and out of the fibers that make up the fabric. This is much like the colored strings the child in the photo is weaving over and under the fibers on the cardboard. I’ve added arrows to point to one of the strings. If this string were cut in several places, it could easily be removed. The same thing can be done with some dyes when you wash your clothes with detergents containing enzymes.
It is a bit more involved than just snipping the dye particles so they can be washed out, but it is not difficult to understand. In fact, getting stains out of cloth with enzymes is basically the same process as making meat tender with a tenderizing chemical. For information about this process as well as an activity you can do yourself, see
This happens when you wash your clothes with detergents containing enzymes. That decompose chemicals in the stain. Now that is a really smart enzyme to pick out only the dye and not the fibers in my clothes.
For more information about enzymes, see BIOCHEMISTRY: ENZYMES
More Later,
Janice