Several years ago there was a product called Dye Magnet on the market; I was skeptical about using it because I wasn’t sure that it would really work. I had no choice but to try it after it was on sale at the grocery store and I had a $1.00 off coupon [SoCal grocery stores doubled coupons up to $1.00 – something I really miss] so I ended up paying about a dollar for it. After the first time I tried it I fell in love with it and never did laundry without it. It was a cloth type thing that you could use over and over again and it figured – just when I started recommending it to other people they stopped making it. When I came across the Shout Color Catcher I was skeptical, these were one time use sheets that were supposed to do the same thing as the Dye Magnet but you could use them with mixed color loads. I decided to give them a try to see if they would really work the way Shout claimed, I might love doing laundry but I hate having to wait until I have a pile of a certain color to wash them.

Shout Color Catcher Dye Trapper

The concept behind this is nice, wash different colored clothes together without having to worry about the dyes depositing on to them and helping to keep brights bright. I used about half the box so far and I do have to say that it does work but you can’t go crazy and start tossing reds in with whites without there being repercussions. These work best when you are washing colored clothes – meaning lights and darks – together. Since most of the stuff I own is black or dark blue, my laundry needs are pretty basic but my kids clothes are a different story. They have whites, colored stuff and mixed stuff like printed t-shirts, sweatpants and shorts. It was their clothes that I tested these out on and for the most part they worked great. The only time I had a problem was when I tossed in new clothes with clothes that had already been washed. Some of the reds and blues did bleed a little and the Color catcher picked up on about 90% of it, I was lucky that I caught it before I tossed them in the dryer. All I did was wash them again with another Color Catcher and the stuff that did bleed a little came out in the second wash.

Directions

These are pretty easy to use, if you’ve ever used dryer sheets then guess what, you will be able to use these. Just toss one of these into the wash with your clothes, add your detergent and turn on your machine. These are one time use sheets so don’t try to use them over again – I’m not sure if it will release the dye if you try to use them over again but I, for one, am not willing to risk it. You don’t have to fish this out of the wet clothes, it is safe to toss in the dryer but you have to make sure that you do eventually throw it away. I forgot about one of these and it ended up getting stuck in a pair of my sons sweatpants and let me just say, he wasn’t too happy about finding “the little surprise” in the leg of them when he went to put them on.

If you have “NLP” [non-laundry people] venturing into your laundry room make sure that they know that these aren’t dryer sheets [they are bigger, that should be a tip off right there]. Some people see the box and automatically assume that they go in the dryer. These won’t hurt clothes if they are tossed in the dryer but, umm, they are meant to go in the washer. I really like the fact that I don’t have to shovel through the wet clothes to look for the sheet to remove it, it’s not that small and most of the time I can spot it when I am grabbing the clothes out of the washer but there are times when I forget. Depending on the amount of dye that it traps the sheet could look relatively “new” or pretty nasty; if it’s full of dye then you might miss it when you are putting clothes in the dryer but like I said, it’s completely safe if it does go into the dryer with clothes.

Price

You get 24 sheets per package so you should have enough to do 24 loads unless you are doing large ones then they recommend that you use two sheets. I picked these up for a little over three dollars at my local grocery store when they were on sale but I haven’t seen them since then. When I asked about them they said that they weren’t sure what the deal was and the person that usually does the stock in that area said, “Uhhh, I never heard of them”. When you do the math on this, even at the full suggested retail price of $3.99, it comes out to about .15 cents a sheet which isn’t that bad if you want to save some money on your electric and water bill by combining loads of clothes.

The Bottom Line

So far I haven’t had any major problems with this product and recommend it to anyone that wants to wash different colored clothes together. This doesn’t work as well as the Dye Magnet but still, I can’t complain about how well it works to attract dyes in the washer and lock them into the sheet. My local grocery store had these in stock for a while but now I can’t seem to find them anywhere so I’m not sure if this is a new product or one that is on it’s way out. When I looked for it online there were several places that had it listed as a ‘new’ product and others that had it listed as ‘out of stock’. If you are someone that hates having piles of clothes lying around and want to get your laundry over with but don’t want to risk having the colors bleed, this is a great product to try out.


As always, thanks for the read!

~^V^~ Freak ~^V^~

© 2005 Freak369


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Snuggle Fabric Softener Dryer Sheets, Botanical Bliss
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Sterilite White Laundry Basket





Recommended: Yes