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Comment by gog | Hacker News Reader

This is an easy problem to solve, find the socks you like and then buy 20 pairs of the same socks and get rid of the old ones.

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Not so fast. Sock magic: I've only bought black socks over the last 5 year, and still I can't seem to find ones anymore that exactly match in both fitting and color (they all seem to have degraded in different color tones)

Maybe your left foot produces slightly more agressive sweat than the right one.

This only really tracks if they intentionally wear socks on specific feet. While some socks have L/R indicators, most don't.

Ah, the trick here is to buy all your socks at the same time, and open all the packs at once. Don't just open a pack every now and then, or they'll age differently and you get the variation in wear and tear. Then once you're down to a few days' worth of raggedy socks, throw them all out at once and open the next batch.

(Source: Am a fellow black-sock-only person who made the above mistake last time around.)

My trick is to have only white socks and to not actually care if they're matching levels of tired.

This requires sock drawer/shelf management. Socks will form a FOFI stack where clean pairs will be taken from the top, worn, washed and returned to the top of the stack while other clean pairs sit beneath without being touched. Those at the top of the stack will wear out faster.

Mitigation might include not washing any socks until all clean pairs are exhausted, but this may result in a smelly linen bin. Alternatives might be keeping clean socks in a pair of tights with the toes cut out - most recently cleaned in the top pushing down, fresh pairs taken from the open toe; hang this up for a better UX.

For my drawers I stack horizontal, old on the left and new fresh washed come in on the right. So you can see what you’ve been wearing and what you haven’t worn for a while and choose accordingly. Works for shirts, socks, underwear, etc.

As far as I'm concerned, the point of a sock monoculture is never to think about matching: as soon as a sock requires any special attention, I simply throw it out.

I only have black ones and a couple of white ones for sports. The white ones are fine, but the black socks get significantly brighter over time. Now sorting almost matching socks is much harder than when I had a hodgepodge. Admittedly I mostly ignore the differences in shade but it doesn't sit well with me.

A sock sorter would be perfect.

Im in a military. I get issued 15 pairs of socks each year in three different styles. But from one year to the next, pairs are never constructed exactly the same. Then the wear/washing history of each pair divides them even within a given year's issue. I have 43 pairs of socks now in my "work socks" drawer (just counted) but no two are interchangeable. When they come out of the drier i still have to individually match them. Interchangable parts tech has yet to crack this field.

Ha I have the same problem. Even the exact same sock won’t match dye colors. Sometimes it’s brighter or darker colors.

This works remarkably well in that you might think you'd end up throwing away a lot of good socks, but in my experience socks are surprisingly prone to either design flaws that sees many socks from the same batches wear out in the same way around the same time and/or similar wear from your footwear etc., so when they start going odds are you'll see a series of rapid failures, and you're not losing much by replacing them all when you're left with few enough.

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