(Last updated: May 17, 2026.) This post is available for discussion on Reddit.

Introduction#

Let’s say you have clean, fragrance-free clothes. Then you wear them into a high fragrance environment, usually for an extended period of time, and you come out with fragrance on your clothes. Ideally you will wash those clothes, the fragrance will come out, and the laundry cycle of life repeats.

But what if you wash them and the fragrance doesn’t come all the way out?

Some environments contain a lot of fragrance. Some materials retain fragrance more aggressively than others. The net result is that sometimes you find yourself with fragrance cross-contamination that just won’t fully come out in a normal wash cycle. The main example of this in my life is my child’s school clothes: these clothes go to school fragrance-free, come home presenting significant fragrance, and the fragrance persists even after a proper wash.

I recently spent a few months rigorously trying many different things to remove the fragrance from these clothes. This post details the method I arrived at for removing this fragrance reliably and why I think it works.

More Context on the Problem#

Based on my observations, I suspect this issue is mostly a redeposition problem, and probably shows up most in front loading HE machines with low wash liquor volumes. (I have LG front loader washing machines.) The technique that I arrived at works on these machines and requires running two back to back cycles: one cycle to properly wash the clothes, and a second cycle to strip the remainder fragrance. Some details of the second cycle go a bit counter to conventional laundry wisdom so read the notes closely.

Part One: Cleaning#

The first thing you want to do is get the clothes clean and remove as much soil and fragrance as you can. Wash the load in your highest water level cycle, with max spin speed, at a minimum of 40C, with full spectrum chemistry. For me that means: Towels cycle, Hot water, Max soil, Max spin, with the Soak and TurboWash cycle modifiers, and all the extra rinses available. For my wash chemistry on these loads I use Tide Free and Gentle liquid (preferrably the Odor Refresh or Advanced Care formulation), FEBU booster, and citric acid in the rinse. At the end of the cycle you should have a load of clean clothes. If you smell no residual fragrance then congratulations you’re done. If you can still smell some residual fragrance, proceed on to the next step.

Part Two: Fragrance Stripping#

To strip the fragrance you’re going to run the load a second time with different chemistry.

Once again you want to wash with high water levels and the hottest temperature that your machine and the load can handle. I use the same cycle settings as above, but without the soak cycle modifier, which saves about 30 minutes.

PITFALL #1: On LG machines you simply CANNOT use the “Extra Hot” setting or the Sanitary cycle for this part of the process because the machines have this annoying safety behavior where they flood the drum with cold water at the end of the wash stage before draining the wash liquor. This cold water flood into the wash liquor immediately causes micelle collapse redeposition and completely thwarts the fragrance lifting we’re doing. This is an unfortunate liability for these machines and it took me a solid month to figure out what was going on.

For your chemistry in this step you’re going to use 2 Tbsp sodium carbonate (aka washing soda) and about 2 Tsp Synthrapol. The Synthrapol is important and you probably won’t get the same result just using your standard detergent. You should also add citric acid to your rinse again.

PITFALL #2: Dosing the Synthrapol is tricky. For this to work reliably you need a higher than usual concentration of detergent so you have lots of micelles to capture all the fragrance compounds coming off the textiles and to fully insulate your load from redeposition during the wash to rinse transition. This means you should see some suds in the wash stage. If you follow the conventional wisdom and dose only to “trace suds” you’re probably not going to get all the fragrance out reliably. You ideally want to dose until you see an inch or two of standing suds. The hard part is that Synthrapol is sudsy so it’s easy to overshoot the mark and end up with a drum full of foam, which is not the goal. While feeling this out for yourself I suggest dosing 1 scant teaspoon at a time into the beginning of the wash cycle until you see the right foam levels. After a few times you’ll get a feel for your actual target dose. My dose is about 1.75tsp. In every other case my laundry advice would be to err on the low side of the dose… but in this case it’s better to err on the high side. Synthrapol rinses well and the extra rinses will make up for any dosing mistakes. I also tried the low foaming version of Synthrapol in this step and it works fine but it didn’t foam that much less, and it has it’s own subtle chemical smell that you may not like. Ultimately I decided to just stick with the regular version of Synthrapol.

Checking Your Result and Caveats#

After the fragrance lifting wash is done you should not be able to detect any fragrance in the washer. If you want to be sure extra sure you can do a smell check on the dryer headspace 5 minutes into the cycle when the clothes are warm and wet - this is where you are most likely to detect even the faintest fragrance residue. When the clothes finish drying they should come out truly fragrance free.

One caveat is that it’s really, really hard to lift fragrance from Elastaine/Spandex. So, while I find this technique to be close to 100% reliable on cotton and polyester, it doesn’t always get Elastaine/Spandex completely across the finish line. If you have Elastaine/Spandex items in your load, check them individually as they come out of the washer and if they still have detectable fragrance finish them with a fragrance lifting soak.

Other Methods#

The biggest question I grappled with in fine tuning this method is: isn’t there some way to do this in a single wash cycle instead of two? The answer is a resounding maybe. If your fragrance cross-contamination is mostly oily/waxy solids, and if your clothes are mostly high quality cottons with durable dyes, then you might be able to remove the fragrance in a single cycle by adding ammonia to your wash. Ultimately I think the two cycle method I’ve outlined above cleans a little more robustly, is a little easier on the cheap dye in lots of kids clothes, and works more consistently across all types of fragrance contamination. But if using ammonia in your wash instead of this two cycle process feels like a better solution for you, it’s certainly a reasonable choice AFAICT.

Thoughts on Top Loaders#

As I mentioned above, this issue and solution are probably specific to HE front loaders. If you have a conventional top loader with an agitator and a deep fill option, you may not have this problem at all, and if you do have this problem there may be other better solutions. I don’t have this type of machine to run tests, but if I did I would start by blending in some Synthrapol into my normal wash cycle.