Dire Emergency Method: Take 1/2 cup dishwashing powder and 1/2 cup non-chlorine bleach powder and dissolve them in warm water in your washer. Add the towels or clothes and let them soak overnight, then wash on a regular cycle.
Distilled white vinegar is a cheap and natural way to effectively remove stains or smells from your towels. A miracle worker in the laundry room and gentle on your fabrics, simply add one cup to your wash to remove yellowing, staining, mildew, and odors. This will leave your towels feeling soft and smelling fresh.
Use Vinegar
Adding between half a cup and a cup of white distilled vinegar to each wash will help remove stains and whiten your towels: you can add it to the fabric-softener dispenser. Diluting one part vinegar in four parts water and spraying it directly onto stains is also a way of pretreating them.
The eco-friendly alternative to bleaching (and actually works really well) is vinegar. Half a cup of white wine vinegar will remove stains and whitens your towels. You can always use the oxy-powders for whites as an alternative but vinegar is a lot cheaper and does the job too.
Take one gallon of water and combine one cup of baking soda to it. Add your white clothes and let them soak. Run your whites in the laundry as normal. After using baking soda, you should notice whiter, brighter, and fresh-smelling laundry.
Bleach and baking soda are valuable in the laundry and are particularly useful in cleaning white clothes. Bleach is suitable for making whites whiter, while baking soda helps make white clothes fresher.
If the label says it's bleach-safe, you're good to go. Otherwise, utilize the fabric composition as the deciding factor. If it's 100% cotton, you should be fine to bleach.
Overuse of chlorine bleach can also cause white natural fibers like cotton and linen to turn yellow. If you can detect a chlorine odor as you remove wet laundry from the washer, you are using too much bleach.
Most hotels use peroxide-based laundry detergents to keep their sheets and towels bright. While these compounds are extremely successful at preventing white linens from greying or yellowing, they do necessitate some amount of knowledge. When used incorrectly, they might cause damage to your linens.
Causes of Towels Yellowing
Towels can turn yellow over time, depending on the frequency of use. Factors such as the sauce contaminated from your hands while cooking in the kitchen, sweat from your face or skin, dead skin spilled from the skin, oil on the skin or hair play a big role in the yellowing of the towels.
White clothes can turn yellow due to a variety of factors, such as using too much detergent and fabric softener, oxygenation, deodorant stains, washing with well water or long-term storage.
Dissolve Baking Soda for a Pre-Soak
If you want extra whitening power, mix laundry detergent and/or oxygen bleach into the water before soaking your towels. Add as much detergent as you would use in a normal wash cycle, then soak for 1-2 hours.
Washing Towels with Vinegar
Use about half the recommended amount of detergent while washing and add ½ to 1 cup of white vinegar to the water during the rinse cycle. The vinegar helps set the colors and removes excess detergent residue.
Washing towels with vinegar and baking soda can bring them back to life in just three steps: Wash towels in hot water and one cup vinegar. Don't add any detergent. Wash the towels a second time (without drying them) in hot water and one cup baking soda.
Create an Oxygen Bleach Solution
Completely submerge the stained garment, and allow it to soak as long as possible—up to eight hours or overnight.
Wash white towels in hot water with ½ cup of Clorox® Regular Bleach2 per regular load. Or, try Clorox® UltimateCare® Bleach, the bleach you can pour directly onto whites. For colored towels, wash in hot water with detergent and Clorox 2® Stain Remover and Color Booster.
Add 1/2 cup baking soda right over the towels. Don't worry about using the dispenser, just pour it right over the towels. If you have a standard washer machine, use 1 cup of baking soda and add it to the towels and then fill with water.
Don't use vinegar and baking soda in laundry together.
That's because when they're used together, vinegar and baking soda in the laundry will neutralize each other, effectively canceling out the benefits of vinegar's low pH and baking soda's high pH.
For Extra-Clean Clothes
“It will help lift dirt and grime from clothing,” says Reichert. Don't put baking soda in your washer's detergent dispenser, however. Instead, sprinkle it into the empty drum of your washer, then add clothes and whatever detergent and fabric softeners you'd normally use.
An even better fix is to use fabric dye. You can use this to re-color the stained spots or just dye the entire towel with the fabric dye, following the directions on the package. Use a dye fixative product to set the color more permanently.
Mix equal parts ammonia and water and pour it over the yellowish stain to soak. Let it dry or until the shirt is washed. Without ammonia, hydrogen peroxide can be used instead.