Throughout the day you are encountered with an amalgam of odors that can latch onto your clothing and taint the overall smell of your fabrics. From the food you eat at lunch time, to your wet dog rolling on top of you after a walk, and even smoke that you have come into contact with – whether you were at a campfire, close to a brush fire, or even experienced a house fire inside your home that left almost everything in your personal indoor environment plagued with the strong odor of smoke. Fire smoke smell is a very strong, offending odor that can be nearly impossible to remove from a surface or item that has been completely submerged by the smoke aroma. Clothing in particular will absorb the odor within the fabric and embed it into the material, this will make your laundry washing process that much harder when it comes to odor removal on the clothes. In this article we are going to discuss smoke odor and go into detail on how you can effectively and rapidly get smoke smell out of your clothes after an encounter with fire smoke.

Why Do I Keep Smelling Smoke?

Smoke from a fire is an odor that will travel far and wide within an environment, and if you have just experienced a house fire or if you have recently attended a campfire the smoke odors can linger around on your clothing long after the exposure took place. Smoke is a collection of tiny solid, liquid, and gas particles that can contain hundreds of different chemicals and fumes – but mostly it contains carbon (soot), tar, oils, and ash. The formation of smoke will occur when there is an incomplete combustion that leaves some items untouched by the fire, but this will create smoke in the environment that can taint the items that weren’t burnt. Basically, the smoke is a collection of tiny unburned particles that will collect on a surface.

Sources of Smoke Odor on Clothes

There can be a variety of sources of smoke odors that can collect on the fabric of your clothing making it difficult to remove the odor from the clothes. Smoke exposure can occur from a campfire that you went to that released the pungent smoke odor onto your clothing, from second-hand exposure to cigarette smoke, or even from a house fire that left all your clothing reeking of smoke aroma.

Tips to Remove Smoke Smell in Clothes

When it comes time to removing the putrid smell of smoke from your clothes there are a number of potential methods you can use to try to accomplish this odor removal. Some of the most commonly used methods that people have tried to expel the smell of smoke from their clothes includes vinegar, baking soda, dry cleaning the clothes, cleaning smoke aroma out of the washing machine, and even utilizing a laundry additive that was designed to restore smoke damaged clothes back to their normal smell. Below we are going to discuss these different methods to removing smoke smell from your clothes and determine which of these is the most effective at eliminating smoke smell from your clothes, for good!  

1.) Soaking Clothes in Vinegar to Remove Odor:

A commonly used method for removing odors from the surfaces of smelly items is by using vinegar. Vinegar is a natural cleaning agent that is used to treat and remove odors and is especially popular for use in your laundry for odor problems. The problem, however, with vinegar is that it has a very strong and abrasive odor that can actually worsen the smell of your fabrics – and when it comes to a strong odor like smoke, the vinegar will hardly touch and eliminate this noxious odor.

2.) Baking Soda in Laundry for Odors

Baking soda is a great option when it comes to non-noxious odors in your laundry such as food spills and other odors that do not require extensive treatment to remove from the fabric. Baking soda works by removing an array of odors by neutralizing the acids that produce the odor. When it comes to the effectiveness of baking soda to remove smoke odor, it can require multiple treatments to even touch the odor on the fabric. Smoke tends to cling deep onto the fibers of the laundry and therefore the process of cleaning these clothes will be difficult and will require a stronger solution to remove.

3.) Will Dry Cleaning Remove Smoke Smell?

For those articles of clothing that are considered delicate like your cotton dress, slacks, or button-down shirts, you may run to your dry-cleaning provider to try to get them to rid the clothing of this odor. However, dry cleaners will only be able to remove some of the odor, not all of the odor completely from the fabric. Ask your laundry dry cleaner if they can add special substances to your laundry that can help to deodorize the fabric – but beware this special substance will likely be a strong chemical agent they use to fight the smoke odor from the clothes, which will leave it with an all new odor.

4.) Washing Machine Smoke Odor Eliminator

Washing machines are odor absorbers that will capture and latch onto odors from your clothing that they remove and harbor these odors within the machine – whether that be in the wash basin, in the rubber seals, or any other spaces in the machine. As your washing machine begins to accumulate these odors, it will begin the process of spreading these odors onto your clothing as they go through the machine. To remove these collected odors from your washing machine and remove the washing machine smoke odor inside the basin it is best to use a washing machine deodorizer that will eliminate and destroy the odors at the first contact. A washing machine deodorizer will utilize a patented technology that will be able to eradicate a broad spectrum of odors including smoke from the fabric and will do so rapidly.

5.) Laundry Additive for Smoke

Among the methods listed above for removing smoke from the fabric of your clothing, the most effective and ideal method to implement for fast odor elimination is the use of a laundry additive for smoke. The OdorKlenz Laundry Additive is an effective, fast, and safe odor and fragrance elimination of machine washable fabrics affected by laundry odors such as smoke/tobacco, mold/mildew, urine, pet, cooking odors, and sweat. OdorKlenz utilizes a patented earth mineral technology that is able to break down an amalgam of odors and chemical odors from fabrics without the use of masking agents or chemicals.