Does freezing your jeans to clean them really work?
Take it from no less an authority than Levi's CEO Chip Bergh — don't bother.
"That's an old wives' tale," Bergh said on CNN's Business Markets Now show on Thursday. "It does not work."
Not only that, the CEO of the iconic jeans brand suggests not even washing them at all.
He admitted at a Fortune Magazine event in 2014 that the old jeans he was wearing had never been washed. He argued that not cleaning them preserves the fit and also helps the environment by saving energy and water.
"I know that sounds totally disgusting,'' he said. "It's fine, I have yet to get a skin disease or anything else. It works."
Bergh admitted on the CNN show Thursday that he still hasn't washed that pair of jeans, which are now 10 years old.
Putting jeans in the freezer to kill germs has been considered a hack for getting them clean without having to wash them.
InStyle fashion editor Kahlana Barfield Brown demonstrated the trick on TODAY in 2017 as her way of keeping her favorite pair just the way she likes them.
"When it's time to clean them, and this is gonna sound crazy, I throw them in the freezer,'' Brown said. "And what that does is it helps to disinfect them. Not a hundred percent, but it does a pretty good job, and you also just know they're gonna fit the same, and the color's gonna look the same."
During a panel discussion on the 3rd hour of TODAY Friday, Willie Geist said his go-to cleaning move for jeans has to do with heat, not cold.
"I guess I feel like they're not really ever dirty or that the denim hides it,'' Willie said. "Sometimes what I will do — just throw them in the dryer. Skip the wash, go right to the dryer."
"I feel like you're burning the bacteria and grime into your jeans,'' Dylan Dreyer said.
"Doesn't heat kill germs?" Willie said.
Dylan advocated for simple common sense in the end.
"Why aren't we just washing our jeans?" she said.