Tag Archives: Caring For Your Scrubs And Lab Coats

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How Often Do You Buy New Scrubs?

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If you’re in the medical profession, you’ll know firsthand how many sets of scrubs you need for the clinical aspect of your work. Especially if you’re wearing scrubs every day, you should own plenty of pairs of scrubs so that you can have a clean set each day. For sanitary reasons, obviously, it is unprofessional to wear scrubs that have been worn and not washed.

So how often do you need to get new scrubs? This depends on the quality of the scrubs you own, and how often you wear them.

With cheap, low-quality scrubs, you’ll probably find that you need to replace them more often before you start to notice rips, tears, and seams coming apart from regular wear. You’ll probably find yourself needing new scrubs every few months, a couple times a year at least.

If you own or are planning to purchase higher quality scrubs, they will last a lot longer. This is why you can rationalize the fact that high quality scrubs, unsurprisingly, come with higher price tags. It’s worth the investment because they last so much longer – you will probably only need to replace them every couple of years.

To sum up, how often you replace your scrubs is a factor of your own scrubs durability, your clinical requirements, and your own personal taste.

Steaming Vs Ironing Your Clothing

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When it comes to clothing maintenance, a little goes a long way in making sure your clothes look as nice as they did the day you got them! Simple tips like avoiding the dryer when you can, and removing stains with a powerful detergent are easy to understand, but what about wrinkles?

For starters, wrinkle-releasing fabric is a godsend. It really makes your life easier and saves you time. But clothes get wrinkled, and you need a fast and easy way to get them out! Which begs the question, steaming or ironing?

 

I am a diehard fan of steaming over ironing my clothes, and here’s why.

  1. No worrying about heat settings. What if the care tag of your clothes has been worn out or torn off so you don’t know what heat setting to put your iron? Also, what if the fabric is something you’ve never heard of and you’re not sure if you should put the heat setting closer to polyester or cotton? If you make it too hot, ironing will ruin the fabric of your clothes. Steaming doesn’t have a heat setting, it works for all fabrics and won’t ruin them.
  2. It’s faster and more convenient. With a handheld steamer, it takes about 2 minutes for the water to heat up and then a fraction of the time to get the wrinkles out compared to running the entire iron over the fabric. You also need an ironing board or another surface to use an iron, with a steamer you just need a hanger!
  3. Awkward folds and seams. I know you’ve experienced the frustration of trying to iron a shirt or a dress and having a part that folds strangely or that looks like it shouldn’t be ironed. What do you do then? With a steamer, you don’t need to guess – just let the wrinkles be released and it will fall into shape.

Portable Handheld Steamer

The good news is that a lot of irons today come with a steamer setting so you don’t actually have to make a hard decision to break up with your ironing habits. Personally, I cannot seem to understand how to make that setting work on my iron, so I went ahead and bought a little handheld portable steamer for $30 and it’s made my life so much easier!

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Should You Be Dry Cleaning Your Lab Coat?

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The best way to keep your clothes looking nice for as long as possible? Taking good care of them. Try to avoid putting your nice clothes in the dryer, as high heat and tumbling can really wreck the fabric, and make sure you’re keeping your clothing clean and free of stains.

These are good rules of thumb, but proper maintenance of your professional clothing doesn’t need to be expensive and there actually is no reason for you to be having your lab coat dry cleaned after every wear. It’s expensive and if your lab coat is made of durable high quality fabric, it should be able to withstand going through the washing machine.

Especially if you’ve spent a lot of money on a premium lab coat, you may be tempted to take it to the dry cleaner instead of regular laundry, and that ultimately is a choice that is up to you, but at the end of the day it’s probably unnecessary. In fact, having to dry clean your lab coat might mean it ends up getting dirtier than it should, since it is a pain to have to visit the dry cleaner every time you wear your coat once.

And for the record…you should be washing your lab coat after every use!

Ellody back belt

Wrinkle Free Scrubs

Keep Your Scrubs Wrinkle-Free, No Iron Needed

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Dirty little secret: I have a really bad laundry habit. Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly lazy, once I take my clothes out of the dryer I will dump them all in a pile on my bed with the intention to fold and put them away later…only to come back to my bedroom ready to go to sleep and find a giant pile of clothes still on my bed, unfolded. And instead of folding my laundry bleary-eyed and tired, I’ll usually just shove them onto the floor to make room for my sleepy self.

I know I can’t be the only one guilty of doing this! But it really is a bad habit, because the clothes that end up on my floor usually end up getting stepped on or mixed in with dirty clothes. Meaning I end up having to rewash the clothes that I already put through the laundry! It’s a waste of time and resources.

What I should be doing – and everyone else who *sometimes* does this – is just take the time to fold my laundry as soon as it’s out of the dryer, while it’s still a little warm.

Why?

When your laundry just sits in a heap on the bed, even if just for an hour or two, it’s more than likely that it will get wrinkled. Then comes the ironing, another pain in the butt and a huge time-eater.

For medical professionals who are short on time and high on responsibilities, you may not always have time to fold your laundry right as soon as it’s done. If this is the case for you, your best option is to find a quality pair of low-maintenance scrubs that are made in a wrinkle free fabric, like these ones.

When you are in a rush and your laundry comes out of the dryer, just take a minute to sort out your scrubs from the rest and put them on a hanger or lay them out flat. Voila! you have wrinkle-free scrubs that don’t require any ironing, saving you some valuable time and making your pre-work routine a little easier.

The Best Hack For Removing Deodorant Stains From Your Scrubs

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Pilling, shrinking, staining – these are just a few clothing woes that we experience as a result of just wearing our scrubs and lab coats as they’re meant to be worn. For the most part, they’re unavoidable. After all, your medical uniform is meant to protect you and inform others while you’re on the job, so stains and damage will naturally occur over time. It’s just a part of natural wear and tear.

But how frustrating is it when you put on your freshly washed dark blue scrubs, only to discover that your deodorant left an unsightly white smear all over the hem?

Scrubs Top For Women

There are two options when you find yourself in this situation. Either you toss your scrubs top back in the laundry to be cleaned again (don’t do this – it’s wasteful), or you try your hand at getting that deodorant stain out by hand. Luckily for you, there’s a much easier, cleaner, and effective way to remove these white stains.

Instead of trying to spot clean these stains from your clothes with soap and water, rub at the stain vigorously with another piece of clean clothing (or a rag works fine too). The friction from the fabric will absorb the deodorant and disperse the particles so that the stain disappears like magic! This is much more effective, and gets rid of these stains from your clothes without getting them damp or making a mess.