ASSOS Active Wear Cleanser
ASSOS Active Wear Cleanser does many, many good things for your cycling kit... presumably...
Words - James Raison
The basket of unspeakable evil
ABOUT
ASSOS Active Wear Cleanser is unsurprisingly used to wash your active wear.
ASSOS claim there's many benefits to their blue liquid: it “is delicate on elastic fibers, pH neutral, neutralizes odors, enhances textile breathability and maintains sharp colour sublimation.”
Yep, that all seems in order. Things should smell better, keep their colour, and last longer. Got it.
USING THE CLEANSER
The first rule of ASSOS Active Wear Cleanser is, apparently, that you do not talk about ASSOS Active Wear Cleanser. There are no instructions on the bottle. At all. So I fired up the interwebz and headed over to the ASSOS website where I read that they: “recommend traditional hand washing or gentle machine washing.” Well hand washing isn’t an option. Ain’t nobody got time for that. So I grabbed my basket full of unspeakable evil, put a cap-full of cleanser in my washing machine and turned it on. Why a cap-full? No idea. They don’t recommend how much to use. So I guessed.
AFTER THE WASH
I was ready to be cynical about the active wear wash but dammit that kit came out super clean. The colours were sharp, the white items were whiter, and my disgustingly yellow-tinged base layers looked fresh and clean. Sure, my perception of cleanliness is hardly robust science but I'm pretty convinced it's coming up better than my regular washing powder.
As for the other stuff I can’t tell if the sharp colour sublimation has been maintained, or that textile breathability has been enhanced. How could I? All I have to go on is that ASSOS’s Swiss-ness means it probably does what they say. You gotta take it on faith that they've done their tests.
CONCLUSION
Cycling kits are damned expensive and ASSOS Active Wear Cleanser probably keeps it in better condition for longer. My 300ml bottle costs $35. Is that good value? I don’t know. I can't even predict how long a bottle will last because I don't know if I'm using the right quantity.
If your kits are expensive and the cleanser helps them live longer then yes, I’d say it might be worth investing in a bottle. I can only report on my experience though. My experience was that my kits looked and smelled a lot better. For some people, that might be enough.
WHERE TO BUY
Want to buy some ASSOS Active Wear Cleanser? Head on over to the Cycle Closet website.
