Fruit of the Loom vs. Hanes: A brief examination

Yes, I will be putting underwear to the test in the week ahead. I've been changing it up, as it were, and I will be pitting Fruit of the Loom briefs against those made by Hanes.

Let's get all philosophical for the moment. For the past six months, I've been consciously thinning out the amount of clothes I have in my drawers and closet ... and that has included an effort to NOT have 100 pairs of underwear clogging the drawer and then piling up when I don't do laundry for a month.

No, I'm trying to keep maybe 2-3 weeks worth of underwear and do laundry weekly (weakly).

And to aid in that effort, I'm no longer buying white underwear. Why, you ask? Because when I'm doing said laundry, it helps to throw my now colored underwear in with the "dark" load of laundry and not wait to do a "white" load, which I don't do all that often. My goal is to pretty much do only "dark" loads and the occasional "white" load. So having underwear that's not white is helping me in that effort.

And ... follow me now those of you who haven't clicked away in disgust ... the deal with underwear in colored fabrics, at least from Fruit of the Loom and Hanes, is that they are (gasp) not 100 percent cotton. Instead, in the case of Fruit of the Loom, they are various cotton-polyester blends (that variance depending on color for some reason).

Surprisingly (or perhaps not), I've been wearing the Fruit of the Loom colored underwear for a few months now and haven't found that to be a problem.

The problem I have had is that while all the Fruit of the Loom underwear I've been buying is in side Medium, some are markedly smaller than others. And we all know how that can be ...

So with Hanes, I'll be looking at quality, consistency (in size) and fit.

And at Target, a five-pack of Fruit of the Loom in colors is $9.50, with a five-pack of Hanes selling for $9.99. There's a small price premium there ... and thus far I find the colors of the Fruit of the Loom a bit better from an aesthetic perspective.

But it's underwear, and I'm not Marky-Mark, so I'm not exactly letting that particular freak flag fly. Except in this text-only blog, that is.