LAUNDRY CARE SYMBOLS

the 28 symbols of the everyday clothing tag per ISO 3758:2023: five treatments in a fixed order, sharing one set of modifiers

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: body and care · everyone · reference · study

Symbols and meanings follow ISO 3758:2023; temperatures come from its tables: tub 30–95 °C, dryer 60/80 °C exhaust, soleplate 110/150/200 °C. The rarer marks of the standard — 50 and 70 °C tubs, no-steam ironing, ambient hand wash — read by this same grammar. Checked 2026-08-13.

FIVE SHAPES AND THREE MODIFIERS INSTEAD OF FORTY ICONS

A care tag is read, not memorised. There are only five shapes — a tub, a triangle, a square, an iron and a circle — and they always stand in the same order. Everything else is a modifier with one shared meaning: dots give the temperature in the dryer and on the iron alike; a bar beneath the mark means a gentler process in the wash and at the cleaner’s alike; a cross means never, in every one of the five shapes.

That is why the 28 symbols on this sheet are not learned one by one: each is assembled from a shape and its modifiers, the way a word is assembled from letters.

On the sheet

Symbols and meanings follow ISO 3758:2023; temperatures come from its tables: tub 30–95 °C, dryer 60/80 °C exhaust, soleplate 110/150/200 °C. The rarer marks of the standard — 50 and 70 °C tubs, no-steam ironing, ambient hand wash — read by this same grammar. Checked 2026-08-13.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 11 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

LAUNDRY CARE SYMBOLS

FIVE SHAPES AND THREE MODIFIERS INSTEAD OF FORTY ICONS

On the sheet

Printing

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