It’s hard to break the routine of dry cleaning your dress shirts, but try it, says David Hamilton, co-owner of Houston’s Hamilton Shirts.

Frequent dry cleaning breaks down the shirts’ fibers and can damage them, and dry-cleaning chemicals can turn shirts an ugly yellow.

Hamilton advises having dress shirts laundered and pressed instead. Or you can machine-wash and hang-dry your shirts, then have your dry cleaner hand-iron rather than machine-press them without using starch, which also can damage the fibers.

And if you get those oily neck stains on your shirts, Hamilton says, remove them by laying the shirt out flat on a hard surface and scrubbing the area with a liquid detergent; then have it professionally laundered.

The experts at Askmen.com say it’s time to look for a new dry cleaner if your clothes fit differently after you get them back (they were likely cleaned at the wrong temperature, causing the threads to shrink); if they look shiny (this happens when fabric is crushed by hard-pressing); or if they have indents such as imprints around the pockets and buttons (improper pressing techniques are the culprit).