We’ve all seen commercials where that cute bear claims that his detergent will make your clothes amazingly soft and snugly.

He’s cute, but his detergent is harsh and full of toxic chemicals. And to boot, laundry detergent is one of the more expensive cleaning agents that you can buy for your home.

So using baking soda instead of, or with your current detergent is great on many levels. Baking soda is also great for getting out stains and keeping your colors bright.

Children’s Clothes

Children have very delicate skin, babies especially. This leads to them getting rashes and irritated skin relatively easy.

Part of this can be traced back to the laundry detergent they use. If you are using a laundry detergent with harsh chemicals and then putting those clothes onto a baby, that’s going to be difficult on their skin.

All you need to do is add ½ a cup of baking soda to the wash cycle along WITH the detergent. This will balance out the harsh chemicals of the detergent, and make them more mild but still effective as a cleaner.

De-odorizing Clothes

Aside from neutralizing many of the harsh chemicals in detergent, if you sprinkle in ½ a cup of baking soda into your wash cycle with a particularly smelly load of clothes, baking soda is a great de-odorizer and your load will be fresh smelling.

You can get the hop on this by even just sprinkling some baking soda into your laundry basket to make sure that your room, or the laundry room, isn’t being overtaken by the smell of some sweaty, crusty clothing.

De-odorizing Shoes

Shoes stink. Feet sweat, and they stink. The sweat seeps into the shoes, and makes them stink.

Everything below your ankles is just a stink factory, but that’s something that baking soda can help with.

After you take off your shoes for the day, just sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of baking soda into the shoes and shake it around a little bit to make sure it coats everything on the inside of the shoe.

Let this sit overnight. Then, just dump the baking soda out before you want to wear it next and your shoe will be much cleaner feeling and smelling.

You can also do this when you want to wear your sneakers barefoot. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon into each shoe to cut down on the moisture and odor.

Stain Remover

Baking soda can also be used prior to the laundry wash cycle as a stain remover. If you eat pasta and get some red sauce on your white shirt, take the shirt off immediately and apply a baking soda and water solution (2 tablespoons of baking soda and 1 tablespoon of water), let it sit for 5 minutes, then spray the stain with a mixture of equal parts water and vinegar.

Let it soak, then throw it into the wash cycle and the stain should be gone.

Oil Remover

Baking soda is good at removing substances like oil and grease from objects or yourself. It soaks oil and grease up and makes it easy to deal with. This means that you can use it specifically to remove things like chapstick, lipstick, and other kinds of products from your clothes.

Just use a baking soda and water solution of equal parts of each to scrub lightly and oil-based products should come out of your clothes easily.

DE-deodorize Hand Washables

We all have delicate that we do, or should, wash by hand. Sometimes they are even so delicate that we shouldn’t be using soap on them, only warm water.

The problem is that most delicate are against our skin, which means that they pick up a good amount of grease, sweat, and body odor. But if you can’t use detergent… then you can use baking soda to remove all of those.

Simply add 2 tablespoons of baking soda to the sink while you are hand-washing delicate, and the odors will vanish and colors will remain bright.