Care Label Symbols: The Five Symbols and What They Commit You To

The care label is small, legally required in most markets, and quietly one of the highest-risk parts of a garment: get it wrong and you either destroy customers' clothes or invite returns. The symbols are a fixed international language - knowing them (and matching them to what your fabric survived in testing) protects the brand and the buyer. Here is the system.

Five symbols, one fixed order

Every care label uses the same five base symbols, always in this sequence:

1. Wash - a tub (temperature or hand-wash/do-not-wash).
2. Bleach - a triangle (any bleach / oxygen-only / do not bleach).
3. Dry - a square (tumble dry, plus line/flat drying variants).
4. Iron - an iron (dots = temperature; crossed = do not iron).
5. Professional care - a circle (dry-clean / wet-clean codes for the cleaner).

A cross through any symbol means "do not," and dots or bars modify intensity (dots = temperature, bars under a symbol = gentler mechanical action).