Wash it before they wear it

New baby clothes arrive looking finished, and that's exactly the problem. "Finished" is a manufacturing term. Between the loom and the shop floor, garments pick up finishing treatments that keep them crisp, bright and uncreased in transit, and some of that chemistry is still sitting on the fibres when you snip off the tag.

Formaldehyde, for instance, is used in wrinkle-free and anti-shrink finishes. The IARC classifies it as a Group 1 carcinogen, which is why the OEKO-TEX standard allows baby clothing just 16 mg/kg, against 75 mg/kg for adult garments. The people who set textile safety limits clearly believe baby skin deserves a stricter number. It's worth acting like they're right.

So wash everything before first wear. Every sleeper, every gifted outfit, every impulse buy from the sale rail. A first wash removes the surface residue of finishing chemicals, plus whatever the garment collected in warehouses and on shop floors along the way. Use a fragrance-free detergent, which is the standard advice for babies anyway, since fragrance is a common irritant in its own right. Skip the softener. That's the whole ritual. Ten minutes of machine time for the cheapest reduction in chemical exposure you can get.

But be honest about what a wash can and can't do. It rinses off what's resting on the fabric. It cannot remove what's woven into it. Roughly 8,000 chemicals are used across textile manufacturing, according to the European Chemicals Agency, and none of them appear on the care label. A polyester sleeper is still polyester after ten washes. A stain-resistant coating is engineered to survive the machine; surviving the machine is its entire job.

Washing handles the surface. What the garment is made of is a separate question, settled long before it reached you, and it's the one worth asking while you're still standing in the shop.