We poured Sriracha and juice on these stain-repellent shirts, and the results blew us away
Getting a stain on your shirt is a pain - especially if it doesn't wash out.
Clothing company Threadsmiths claims to have a solution with cotton shirts that supposedly repel stains. If you get something on the shirt, you just shake it off or douse it with a little water.
The shirts sounded too good to be true, so we decided to get sloppy and test them out. Tech Insider got two of Threadsmiths' white shirts, the Cavalier tee ($49) and the Grind dress shirt ($89), and dumped liquids on two brave coworkers while they wore them.
For the sake of this experiment, we used five different types of goop: Naked kale juice, Sriracha, French's honey mustard, Welch's blue raspberry juice, and Kikkoman soy sauce.
When we poured the juices and soy sauce on the shirts, the liquid seemed to bounce right off. Any remaining droplets could be washed off with water. It was like magic.
Still, a few clumps of Sriracha and mustard stayed put, even after we rinsed it with water.
"I feel like a Jackson Pollock painting," Tech Insider's Clinton Nguyen, who wore the dress shirt, said.
When I asked Threadsmiths co-founder David Mason about the material's effectiveness for Sriracha versus juice, he said it's because the material is designed to repel water, not oil.
Mason calls the shirts' material "hydro-phobic," meaning it resists water. The cotton has a microscopic whisker-like coating that covers the entire shirt. Acting as a shield against the liquid, the whiskers sit closer together than water molecules, so there's no way liquids can seep in and stick to the fibers, he says.
Since sauces like mustard and Sriracha are oil-based, the shirts didn't resist them as well as water-based liquids.
The shirts will last 80 washes before the stain-resistant whiskers start to not work as well, Mason says.
Nonetheless, both of the shirts do what the company promises: they repel water-based liquids.
$50 is also expensive for a plain white t-shirt, but then again, you can't put a price on never having to worry about stains again.
Watch the full Facebook Live experiment and review below: