Ivan Radic / CC
How often do you wash your jeans? Should they be washed after every wear? After every five wears? Fifty wears? A decade or so ago Canadian college student Josh Le turned his own pair of jeans into a science experiment, wearing them for 15 months without washing them. He wore the jeans 330 times without washing them. If the jeans smelled, he might stick them in the freezer overnight or let them hang for a few hours. After 15 months and one week, the time came to test the jeans. He enlisted the help of his professor, Rachel McQueen. She and Le first swabbed the jeans before washing them. Then they washed the jeans and let him wear them for 13 more days, similar to a more normal amount of time between denim washes, and tested them again. McQueen said: “There did not appear to be differences in the bacterial carriage depending on whether the jeans had been worn for 15 months or only 13 days.” Also: “The bacteria present on the jeans came mostly from Le’s skin and was not harmful.”
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