Once you’ve gunked up your microfiber cloths with dust and skin oils, you’ll need to clean them. The manufacturer of the MagicFiber cloths recommends hand-washing them in warm water with no detergent and hanging them to dry.
Sometimes warm water alone isn’t enough to get grease and oils out of your cloths. So I tried cleaning two microfiber cloths, one with a pea-sized drop of Dawn soap and one with a pea-sized drop of our recommended laundry detergent diluted in a bowl of warm water.
Both options cleaned effectively and didn’t damage the cloth. I’d be inclined to use the Dawn again in the future because it’s more effective at degreasing, and it leeched a bit less black dye from the cloth. If you do this, be sure to rinse the cloth very thoroughly before you use it again, to remove any traces of soap. Hang it to dry.
One Wirecutter editor regularly throws his microfiber cloths in a delicates bag in the washing machine, but we don’t recommend doing this for a few reasons. Using fabric softener, laundry detergent containing fabric softener, bleach, or dryer sheets will coat your microfiber cloth. And if you wash your microfiber cloth with cotton or any other materials that create lint, that lint will cling to your cloth.
Anything on the surface of your cloth can compromise its ability to clean and could scratch delicate surfaces. Also, the agitation in a washing machine causes microfibers to shed a lot of tiny fibers, which have a negative environmental impact. Hand-washing generates less-powerful agitation and will result in fewer fibers shed into your water system.
This article was edited by Connor Grossman and Alejandra Matos.
