The whole label What it is cleaned in
What will my wedding dress be cleaned in?
The circle narrows the field to a letter and a process, and the sources name four routes.
General information from the ACCC, the care labelling standard and the NSW Environment Protection Authority. It is not advice about your dress.
The four routes, and who names each
The circle’s letter is the part of the label that decides the chemistry. P opens the door to perchloroethylene and hydrocarbons together; F allows hydrocarbons on their own; W asks for water, run as a professional process rather than a household wash. Set against those letters, the sources name four methods a dress might meet.
| Method | Which source names it | The mark that allows it |
|---|---|---|
| Dry cleaning with perchloroethylene and hydrocarbons | The ACCC’s table, under the P rows. | The P circle: plain for normal, one bar for mild, two bars for very mild. |
| Dry cleaning with hydrocarbons alone | The ACCC’s table, under the F rows. | The F circle: plain for normal, one bar for mild. The table gives F no very mild mark. |
| Dry cleaning methods outside the table, which the Information Standard’s examples put as liquid carbon dioxide, liquid silicone and ozone | The Consumer Goods (Care Labelling) Information Standard 2023, varying the words path of the Australian and New Zealand Standard. | Named in words in the care instructions, under the Australian and New Zealand Standard. |
| Professional wet cleaning | The ACCC’s table, under the W rows. | The W circle: plain for normal, one bar for mild, two bars for very mild. |
The third row is the one that catches people out, because it is a method with no mark. When the Consumer Goods (Care Labelling) Information Standard 2023 varied the words path of the Australian and New Zealand Standard, it added a sentence to the clause about care procedures: a care procedure may be a dry cleaning method not specified in Table 1 of the Australian and New Zealand Standard, and its examples are hydrocarbon, liquid silicone, ozone and liquid carbon dioxide. A dress cleaned in liquid carbon dioxide, then, is not outside the labelling system; it is inside the part of the system that is written out in words instead of drawn, which is why the instruction on such a label has to be read rather than glanced at.
Reading the letters against a real dress
For a beaded or lace-trimmed dress, the standard asks the maker to account for exactly those elements: the care instructions must take into account all elements of the article, and the list it gives includes padding, lace, beading, trims, decals, linings and embroidery. Where that produces a circle, the letter is the whole instruction.
A P circle without a bar allows perchloroethylene and hydrocarbons in a normal process. Two bars on the same letter tighten it to the very mild process the table names. An F circle moves the dress off perchloroethylene entirely: the table’s F rows name hydrocarbons and nothing else. A W circle takes the dress the other way, into professional wet cleaning.
Two of the marks on the table are refusals rather than permissions. A crossed circle refuses dry cleaning, and a crossed W refuses professional wet cleaning. Read together with a letter they are precise, not contradictory: a dress whose label carries a crossed circle beside a W is a dress that may be wet cleaned professionally and may not be dry cleaned at all.
What sits on the cleaner
Whichever route the circle allows, the cleaner carries duties that have nothing to do with the dress. The NSW Environment Protection Authority treats the proper storage, handling and disposal of perchloroethylene and its waste as a legal responsibility for every dry cleaner, and says the chemical is one dry cleaners often use as a solvent. The authority’s words for the solvent are PERC.
The duty is written into the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997, which the authority says requires PERC to be managed properly so that it does not harm the environment, and the authority’s guidance says the solvent and its waste are toxic to land and to water ecosystems. Its guidance for the trade, Managing dry cleaning waste, sets out what lawful disposal means: waste taken away by an approved transporter and delivered to a facility licensed by the authority. The authority also tells cleaners to ask their chemical supplier and to check the material and safety data sheet for the chemicals they hold.
The penalties attached to getting it wrong are the reason the duties are worth knowing from outside the trade. The NSW Environment Protection Authority sets out the penalties for illegal dumping and for sending waste where it cannot lawfully go; check its current guidance before you rely on a figure. In 2009 the guidance added that the movement of PERC and its waste was being monitored across New South Wales, and that businesses which cannot account for their waste are investigated and can be fined or prosecuted.
What the mark does not say
A care symbol is a permission, not a score: the letter says which cleaning the maker allows, and the bars set the process, in the ACCC’s own table. Neither the standard nor the table ranks one permitted method above another for a wedding dress. What they fix is what is allowed; how well a particular cleaner runs its machine is not something any mark on a label can tell you.
One more thing belongs beside the marks themselves. The care labelling symbols are protected by intellectual property owned by GINETEX, and the ACCC’s guide states that any use of these symbols requires prior authorisation from GINETEX.
If the dress has come back from a cleaner rather than gone to one, the letters stop being the question: the split between the cleaner’s work and the maker’s goods is the next page.