Cat Hair Don't Care
Published over 8 years ago by Shannon Lee
Cat hair. I find it everywhere. Floor, furniture, bed, clothes, and occasionally my own mouth. Every time I clean out the lint trap I think I have enough cat hair in there to clone my cat. So what can be done? Naturally, I turned to the internet to find ways of eliminating the abundance of cat hair in my life. There’s tons of info out there so I decided to put some life hacks, tips and tricks to the test.
First suggestion: start with grooming. If you groom your kitty regularly you can reduce the amount of cat hair that’s shed. So we start with a good brushing of the coat. My cat loves to be brushed! Every morning she rubs against her brush and purrs, hoping I will brush her. My favourite brush to use is the FURminator, which can be found on Amazon starting from $29.99. It comes in large and small sizes and in short or long hair models. The company claims their brush reduces hairballs and can reduce shedding by up to 90%. It works great for us and I think it’s worth the price tag. When I was searching for grooming tips I also came across vacuum attachments you can buy from Dyson and FURminator. Seriously?! Who thought that trying to vacuum groom a cat would be a good idea? Now if you could attach it to a broom you might be on to something. All that hair in just one swipe!
Next the carpets! For me personally, vacuuming itself is an accomplishment. Whenever I do vacuum I have to empty the canister multiple times. Each time I feel a mix of shame and awe as I watch the contents spill into the garbage. The makeup is about 45% cat hair, 35% my hair, 19.99% dirt and 0.01% glitter. After vacuuming I feel pretty good as well as disgusted that I was living on carpet in that state - but not enough to make vacuuming a daily priority. According to Pinterest, though, I should be doing more to rid my carpets of cat hair. Apparently if you take a squeegee to the carpet you can get everything the vacuum didn’t. I decided to give it a try. While I was sitting there squeegeeing hair out of my carpet my first thought was who has the time or desire to do this? But then it became somewhat therapeutic and I was pretty shocked at what came up. Although it didn’t look like I sheared a sheep like the Pinterest picture, it was still pretty gross. This was just from a small portion of carpet I did. (Spoiler alert: although I said it was therapeutic I still had no desire to do my whole living room).
You can also use this method on a fabric couch. Or, if you want to avoid copious amounts of unnecessary work, take the preemptive route and buy a leather couch or at least one with removable cushion covers you can throw in the wash. The couch is a huge cat hair magnet! Especially if you and your furry friend watch as much Netflix as we do!
Ever feel like your cat can sense when you’re wearing black? Especially staticky black yoga pants? Those bad boys are like a magnet to hair. Even washing them doesn’t always get all the hair off. This isn’t a huge deal because I’m likely just lounging around in my cat hair filled house and going to pick up more, but what if I want to wear them out in public? Say, wear them to yoga (more likely the grocery store)? Wearing yoga pants in public is already a borderline fashion faux pas and displaying them covered in cat hair may reveal the true you even earlier than intended. So here is my trick to get the most cat hair off your clothes as possible: Before you wash your clothes throw them in the dryer on a no heat setting with a bounce sheet. It’s very important that it’s on no heat so it doesn’t set any stains. If your dryer doesn’t have a no heat setting use the lowest setting possible and make sure there are no stains on the clothes. After the clothes have spent about 5 minutes in the dryer wash as you normally would. The pre dryer cycle loosens up the hair so less clings and more comes off in the wash cycle. If you are like me and live out of your laundry basket rather than your closet, you are unlikely to use this method for anything other than, perhaps, your job interview outfit. In that case, embrace your cat hair covered clothes! Even better, celebrate all that hair by rocking a sweater like this one from HUMAN for $35 USD.
Source: HUMAN
In fact, after researching all these methods of cat hair removal all I want to do is cuddle my kitty and let her nestle into me. After all, what’s a little cat hair when that’s the trade off.