Care Symbols

Care symbols break down into five icon families on a U.S. label: a wash tub for washing (with dots or numbers for water temperature), a triangle for bleach, a square for drying, an iron for pressing, and a circle for dry cleaning — bars underneath any of them mean a gentler cycle, and an X through one means don't do that at all. The symbol set follows ASTM D5489, and the FTC requires a permanent care label on nearly every garment sold in the U.S. under its Care Labeling Rule.

For decorated apparel specifically, care symbols carry information the printer needs as much as the buyer does — a shirt with a screen-printed design shouldn't get the iron-directly-on-print treatment, and the care label is where that gets communicated downstream to whoever's doing laundry for a uniform program or a retail customer.

Reading the wash tub symbol correctly comes down to the dots inside it: one dot signals the coolest setting, roughly 86°F/30°C, climbing through additional dots for warmer water, and a hand icon inside the tub means hand-wash only, no machine. European-made blanks often print the actual temperature number instead of dots, worth knowing when a decorator is sourcing overseas stock and has to translate that tag correctly for a US buyer.

The mistake is reading an empty triangle as 'no bleach needed' rather than 'any bleach is fine.' The triangle family actually carries three distinct meanings — plain means any bleach is safe, diagonal lines inside mean non-chlorine bleach only, and an X through it means none at all — and printed apparel almost always falls into that middle category, since chlorine bleach breaks down most inks and dyes fast.