Cleanliness is a spectrum, from the pristine to the putrid – and usually it’s pretty clear-cut where something lands on that spectrum. Wearing bike shorts for multiple days in a row without washing – a pretty clear faux-pas. Ditto jerseys and base layers. But there’s one cycling clothing category which sits in a weird middle-ground: cycling gloves.
A thread on Escape Collective’s member-only Discord provides an interesting overview of this phenomenon: some people washing them every day, some people washing them rarely, and both groups good-naturedly baffled by the other. So how does this range of rusted-on beliefs come about?
The answer – as these things often do – likely lies in the mists of time: a distant, sepia-tinted period where cycling gloves were made of leather. This had pros and cons: leather was (/is) extremely hardy and conforms beautifully to hands over time, but doesn’t play all that well with water, especially a rigorous wash. There are ways around this – leather balm, for instance, to help restore the material’s supple properties – but it’s hardly a set-and-forget.
There are still leather cycling gloves available – and they had a notable but brief resurgence during the early days of Rapha, thanks to their gorgeous, expensive, and leather-daddy-fetish-adjacent Grand Tour mitts – but synthetic materials are now by far the more common option. But the transfer of received wisdom is a sticky thing, and the belief that gloves aren’t a regular-wash item has held fast for some.
There’s some logic to the fact that you might wash your gloves less often than your bib shorts – less genital or arse contact, for starters, unless you’re going about things wrong – but it’s not like the hands are immune from bacteria or sweat. Observe where they are: at the end of your arm and downward, meaning that sweat from your arm runs south into them. They also, often, have towelling sections on the thumb: handy for wiping sweat and snot away from your face, leaving silvery snail-like traces. Which, when you think about it, is probably a little bit gross when it builds up over days, weeks, or months.
But washing gloves is not without its complications. For starters: most people have fewer pairs of gloves than they would have, say, bib shorts or jerseys, which can mean pressing the gloves into service for a string of rides if the washing cycle doesn’t line up. If they’re padded, they also take longer to dry than a jersey or base layer. And importantly, they don’t actually feel all that nice when they’re freshly-laundered: many synthetic leathers feel kinda crunchy and rough on the hand, and it takes a while for them to soften up.
So what’s the expert advice? According to Handup – a specialist bike glove brand based in Tennessee – you should “wash them more often than you would think,” specifically within a day or two of getting them sweaty. The key reason, they say, is that the salt in sweat is corrosive, which eats away at the threads over time and can cause thread blowouts, especially in the delicate seams between the fingers. Regular washing can also help prevent the buildup of odour.
Most contemporary-design gloves will be able to handle a machine wash, but handwash is an option too: some Escape Collective members even wear them into the shower (with or without their helmets) after a hard ride. There are some important caveats to note here – many winter gloves featuring either a membrane or a DWR (Durable Water Repellent) treatment can lose their properties if washing with regular detergent. And gloves across the spectrum should be air-dried rather than machine-dried, to avoid the padding or any filling from breaking down and bunching up.
Of course, there’s always the option of going gloveless – a move that means that you don’t have to worry about days-long build-up of sweat or snot (unless you’ve got truly awful hand-hygiene). But there’s a reason gloves were invented in the first place: protection from crashes or chafing, extra comfort, extra warmth, and a handy place to wipe your bodily secretions. And as an added bonus, you get to slot into a weirdly tribalistic debate about how often you should wash them.
So then: are you a wash-every-ride type of person, or do you take a more relaxed approach to the situation, and why?
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