When it’s freezing outside, but you have an adorable skirt, what do you do? Grab a pair of tights, of course. They’re cheap, colorful, comfortable and transform any outfit into a winter-worthy ensemble.
But how do you solve the unending struggle of static making your skirt, tights and hair a clingy, high-maintenance mess? With 31 days of dresses and tights in my future as Dressember gets underway, I used this polyester dress shirt to test 5 ways to get rid of the static once and for all:
1. Water
I found a few variations for this recommendation. A lot of them involved the dryer, but since the fabrics that give me the most issues with static can’t go in the dryer, I didn’t try anything that recommended sprinkling, spraying, or otherwise wetting clothes before or after drying them. I did try wetting my hands and wiping them on my shirt halfway through the day, but the effects were temporary: the static came back as soon as the fabric dried.
2. A Metal Coat Hanger
Am I the only one who only owns plastic hangers? I had to settle for a pants hanger that had a plastic top and a metal rod that the clips attach to. Maybe it was the wrong type of metal, or maybe the plastic messed with the hanger’s static-reducing powers, but either way, it didn’t work.
3. A Dryer Sheet
Obviously, dryer sheets work miracles when you use them in the dryer. But since anything involving the dryer was off limits for the shirt I was using, I took the advice of several websites and rubbed it on dry clothes. The more I rubbed, the better it worked, but the downside was that the sheet works by leaving a waxy residue behind. On knit fabrics and fleece, it would probably be fine, but it wasn’t a great solution for my black dress shirt.
4. A Safety Pin
This one didn’t work at all. The static paid no mind to the pin on the hem of my clothing, and I ended up taking it off pretty quickly since I was worried about the pin inexplicably coming undone and stabbing me when I least expected it.
5. Hairspray
A friend recommended spraying hairspray on my shirt, and it worked well, but I didn’t like the smell or the feeling of hairspray on my clothes. It was pretty reliable, but it wasn’t something I wanted to use every day.
6. Lotion
I was pretty skeptical of this at first. Wiping lotion on my clothes seemed like an even messier option than the dryer sheet, but I gave it a shot anyway (I was getting desperate). And it worked. As long as I didn’t use too much, it never showed on my dress shirt, leggings, tights, dresses or skirts, and I even started keeping a bottle of hand lotion in my car for mid-day static crises. I also found out that putting on lotion before getting dressed helps fight static before it starts. I invested in the biggest bottle of Jergen’s I could find, and I’ve been happily rocking skirts and tights ever since.
Image: Cover, 1.