About

Why this site exists

Nobody reads a care label until something has already shrunk.

Last updated 25 July 2026

I ruined a merino jumper. It went into the machine on a normal 40 °C cycle and came out sized for a child. The label had told me exactly what would happen — a tub with two bars under it and a square with a horizontal line — and I had no idea that either symbol meant anything at all.

When I went looking for an explanation, every page I found had the same problem: a wall of thumbnails with one-line captions underneath. They tell you what each individual pictogram means, but they never explain that the symbols are a system — five shapes for five processes, with dots for heat, bars for gentleness and a cross for prohibition. Learn those four rules and you never need a chart again. That is the page I wanted, so I built it.

Who writes this

Yetik Deniz Daniel — I live in Budapest and I trained as a mechanical engineer. That is not a textile qualification, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What it did give me is a particular reflex: when the jumper came out of the machine and I went looking for an answer, my instinct was to go and find the standard rather than read another blog post.

ISO 3758 turned out to be exactly what I should have expected. It is a specification. It has a grammar, it is internally consistent, and it is written for the people printing the labels rather than for the person standing at the machine holding a ruined jumper. Nothing about it is difficult once you see the structure — it has simply never been translated for the people it is actually aimed at. That translation is most of what this site is.

How the guidance here is researched

• The symbols come from the standards, not from other blogs. The primary reference is ISO 3758, the international care labelling code, along with ASTM D5489 for the dot-based system used in the United States and Canada. Where the two disagree, the page says so rather than quietly picking one.
• Every illustration is drawn from scratch. No symbol image on this site was copied from anywhere. They are hand-written SVG, which also means they stay sharp at any size and load in a few kilobytes.
• Temperatures are given as the standard gives them. Where I add practical advice beyond the standard — which fabrics tend to react badly, what a setting is usually called on a machine dial — that is marked as advice, not as part of the specification.
• Corrections get made. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and note the change. The date at the top of each page is real.

What this site is not

It is a reference for reading labels, not a guarantee about your specific garment. A manufacturer can specify something stricter than the standard requires, and the label sewn into your clothes always outranks anything written here. For anything valuable, unusual, structured or antique, a professional cleaner will know things this site cannot.

How the site pays for itself

FabricFile is free to read and carries advertising. Ads are served by third parties and are marked as advertising where they appear; nothing in the written guidance is influenced by an advertiser, and no advertiser sees these pages before they are published. The privacy policy explains exactly what data that advertising involves and how to control it.

Get in touch

Corrections, a symbol I have missed, or a label that defeats you entirely — send it over. Details are on the contact page.