How to wash silk
A few years ago I found myself in the situation that I had a silk shirt that needed washing. The problem was that I had never washed silk before and was afraid of ruining it, so I did a web search and found some very contradictory and confusing advice.
Eventually, after adding all the advice up and drawing some conclusions, I came up with this method which has worked well for me since then:
- Hand wash.
- Use shampoo. The shampoo should be ordinary plain, unperfumed, hair shampoo. (You do not want to get some expensive shampoo that is designed to add stuff to your hair. Also, you do not want to get "two-in-one shampoo" with conditioner in it, for the same reason.)
- Iron while it's still fairly wet (but not dripping). No need to iron it dry though, just iron until it gets nice and smooth.
- Let it dry on a hanger (assuming we're still talking about shirts).
The idea about using shampoo makes sense because it is designed to gently clean the same type of dirt (sweat and grease from your skin) as you would get on your silk shirts (especially the collars).