The lifespan of your socks depends on how you wear them, where you wear them, how they fit you, and how you wash them. Some socks are designed for specific activities like running, hiking, biking, or walking. They are made from materials that fit each activity, and they have special features designed for the best performance when you’re performing that specific activity.
If you wear socks around the house on a rough floor or a carpet, their lifespan will be short. If the sock is too big or too small, this can also affect its lifespan. If your socks are too small, your feet will push against the fabric, tearing it over time, creating those holes you see all the time. If the socks are too big, they will move around your foot, folding and bunching up, also affecting their durability.
You can prolong the life of your socks with just a few simple steps. Here’s how:
1. Don’t tie them together
You know that thing you do when you keep your socks in their pairs, you make a knot out of them to make sure you don’t lose one of them, stop it. It may be a faster and more convenient approach but over time, it will cause your socks to lose their shape and elasticity. Instead, fold the socks together so they keep their shape.
2. Don’t Use Socks as Slippers
Walking around the house without shoes leaves your socks more vulnerable. You never know when you’ll run into something sharp on the floor, such as a nail or a piece of glass. If you kick your shoes off when you get home and proceed to walk around in your socks, you’re compounding your sock wear issues. Socks are intended to provide comfort and cushioning when worn inside a pair of shoes. They’re not designed to be footwear. An exception is for socks designed with silicone grips, like hipSwan's Flow socks. They're designed to be worn in specific settings like on yoga mats or Pilates reformers.
3. Keep your toenails trimmed
Do you know how holes magically appear in your socks?? Well, there is no magic after all. Every time you put on your socks, your nails press on the fabric and can make a small hole. Thereafter, every wear expands that hole until you can see it and then more and more until the whole world can see it too.
4. Don’t wash them with the rest of your clothes
If you throw your socks in the machine with the rest of your clothes, their fate is usually one or all of the following: other clothes pull on the fabric and cause lints and bobbling, and tumble drying wears off the elastic. A better choice, if you will be using a washing machine, is to enclose your socks in a lingerie bag and wash them on the gentle cycle.
5. Don’t iron them
Keep the heat away from your socks. The more heat the fabrics of your socks are exposed to, the less snuggly it feels when you put them on.
6. Hang them out to dry
If you want to increase the lifespan of your socks, avoid the last-minute clean-up, wringing, and whatever else you do to make your socks ‘wash and wear’.
You can’t completely prevent your socks from getting holes in them. However, you can take action to minimize it as much as possible.
