White fabrics acquire a slight color cast after use (mainly grey or yellow). Since blue and yellow are complementary colors in the subtractive color model of color perception, adding a trace of blue color to the slightly off-white color of these fabrics makes them appear whiter. Laundry detergents may also use fluorescing agents to similar effect. Many white fabrics are blued during manufacturing. Bluing is not permanent and rinses out over time leaving dingy or yellowed whites. A commercial bluing product allows the consumer to add the bluing back into the fabric to restore whiteness.On the same principle, bluing is sometimes used by white-super people in a blue rinse.
Bluing has other miscellaneous household uses, including as an ingredient in rock crystal “gardens” (whereby a porous item is placed in a salt solution, the solution then precipitating out as crystals), and to improve the appearance of swimming-pool water.
Laundry bluing is made of a very fine blue iron powder suspended in water (a colloidal suspension).
Blue colorings have been added to rinse water for centuries, first in the form of powder blue or smalt, or using small lumps of indigo and starch, called stone blue. After the invention of synthetic ultramarine and Prussian blue it was manufactured by many companies. In many places, it has been replaced by bleach for its primary purpose.