What do they actually do to your clothes at the dry cleaners?
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Answers:
they clean them.
They use non-water-based solvents to remove dirt and stains from clothes. The potential for using petroleum based solvents in this manner was first discovered in the mid-19th century by French dye-works owner Jean Baptiste Jolly, who noticed that his tablecloth became cleaner after his maid spilled kerosene on it, and from this observation developed a service to clean other people's clothes in this manner, which he termed "nettoyage à sec," or "dry cleaning" in English.[1]
Early dry cleaners used petroleum-based solvents, such as gasoline and kerosene. Concerns over flammability led William Joseph Stoddard, a dry cleaner from Atlanta, to develop Stoddard solvent as a slightly less flammable alternative to gasoline-based solvents. The use of highly flammable petroleum solvents led to many fires and explosions, which resulted in heavy regulation of dry cleaners.
After World War I, dry cleaners began using various chlorinated solvents. These solvents were much less flammable than petroleum solvents and had much greater cleaning power. By the mid-1930s the dry cleaning industry had adopted tetrachloroethylene (perchloroethylene) as a standard, colloquially called "perc," as the ideal solvent. It is stable, nonflammable, and has excellent cleaning power and is gentle to most garments.
Sometimes they clean them with chemicals. Sometimes they lose them. Sometimes if the cloths look clean already they just press them and give them back!
Wash your clothes with everybody else's clothes, and if they say "dry clean" that's exactly what they do put them in a dryer with an powder solution to "freshen" them up, uses no water, and yes, they are with everybody else's. Oh yea, they charge you too much while they are at it!
Whatever it is...it is better then what you can do at your house. The clean it better, then they press it firmer and tighter, and whatever else you need done.
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