Why your clothes still smell of dog a day after washing them

So you work at it. Their bed goes on the hottest wash the label allows.

A scent booster goes in every load.

They're banned from your bed, and the sofa is a battle you lose most evenings.

And it comes back. Not in a month. By the weekend.

Around four in ten UK homes have a dog.

In one survey, 44% of dog owners said they worried about having people round because of the smell or the mess.

So if you tense up a bit when the doorbell goes, you're a long way from the only one.

You've been on the other side of this.

You're round at a friend's. You sit down next to the dog's blanket and boom: dog.

And there's your friend, sat right next to it, asking if you want a tea.

You think, how on Earth can they not smell that?

Here's how. Your nose is built to notice change, so anything constant gets filed as background.

Live with a smell for a couple of weeks and your nose more or less stops raising it.

You might be that friend. And almost nobody will tell you.

But it isn't you. Clothes that smell of dog aren't dirty clothes.

It isn't your dog either. They're just being a dog.

It's what the fabric is holding on to.

You're not noseblind because you've let things slide. You're noseblind because you live there.

Every dog's skin makes oil and has bacteria and yeast living on it.

They feed on the oil, and what they make from it (basically poop) is the smell.

Your dog lies on their bed and the throw, and the oil goes with them.

Think of a drop of oil in a glass of water. It sits there and doesn't dissolve.

The same thing happens in the washing machine, particularly if the fabric is polyester, which clings onto oil.

Most detergents get some of it out.

What's left carries over to the next wash, and the next, and builds up in the fibres.

Then the fabric warms up. They lie on it, the radiator comes on, you pull it over your knees. Warm oil gives off more smell than cold.

So it comes out of the machine smelling of nothing much, and by teatime it smells of your dog.

Washing hotter feels like the answer. Mostly it isn't.

One study found cooler water did the better job on the oily part of the smell.

So it isn't coming back, it's been in the fabric the whole time, waiting to warm up.

Scent boosters, softener and fabric sprays put perfume on top of the oil, and the fabric carries on giving off its own smell underneath.

White vinegar and bicarb barely touch oil.

Mix the two and they mostly cancel each other out. You've made fizzy water.

And fragrance can irritate a dog's skin and airways, which is why some vets advise steering clear of heavily fragranced products around dogs.

Then there's the detergent. If it's non-bio, there are no enzymes in it for the skin flakes and slobber.

If it's bio, some enzymes can actually make the smell worse. Lipase in particular.

And it's in a lot of the bio detergents on the supermarket shelf. Check your pack.

None of this means you picked a bad detergent. It means the job you gave it is a hard one.

Five things:

✓ It has to pull the oil off the fibre and keep it in the water.

✓ It has to work in cool water.

✓ It has to leave the fat-splitting enzyme out.

✓ It needs protease for the skin flakes and slobber.

✓ It can't lean on heavy fragrance to cover what's left.

Then give it time. An hour in cool water before the wash tends to do more than turning the heat up.

It's a short list and it's the exact one we used when creating our laundry detergent sheets.

We're Dip, a UK company that makes laundry detergent as a dry sheet instead of a liquid or a pod.

A sheet is thin, dry, concentrated detergent that goes in the drum with the washing and dissolves.

Charlie, who started the company, has two Labradors, and he's not the only one on the team with a dog.

So naturally, dog smell was one of the non-negotiables.

Here's how a sheet ticks all five.

The coconut-derived cleaning agents pull the oil off the fibre and hold it in the water until it drains away.

The sheet dissolves at any temperature, so a cool wash isn't a compromise.

The specks you can see in it are the enzymes: a blend with a protease for the skin flakes and slobber, and no lipase.

They dissolve slowly, so they're still working partway through the wash.

And Fresh Linen has a light, clean scent, while Fragrance Free and Extra Sensitive smell of nothing.

It's a full laundry detergent, not a specialist for one throw.

A torn corner of a sheet lifted thirteen stains dried into cotton overnight, with just a faint mark left by the paint.

We didn't add anything clever. We took the wrong enzyme out, put the right one in, and kept the scent light or left it out.

Soak it first. Take the cover off your dog's bed, fill a bucket with cool water and a sheet, and give the cover an hour in it. Then put it through the machine as usual.

For a bed that won't go in the machine at all, the bath does the same job. Give it a good rinse after, and plenty of time to dry.

Here's what one Dip customer who lives with a dog told us on camera.

Abi is 22 and lives in Cornwall with Eric, a Springer Spaniel. She uses Fragrance Free because of her eczema.

She's one of more than a hundred thousand UK households who've switched, and over fifteen hundred people have left four or five stars on Trustpilot.

And you get ninety days. Soak their bed, wash it, let them back on it, and live with it.

If it hasn't earned its place, you get your money back.

Your dog was never the problem. The fabric was, and fabric you can do something about.