I'm sure, like me you've seen plenty of posts on how to get rid of stains using household items. I tend to roll my eyes when I see these, because why use household items when you could just wash your clothes. But that aside I decided to try out some of the hacks, to see if they actually work.
The hacks...
I picked seven hacks to try, and I chose these hacks because I had these items laying around, so it was cost effective.
- Use shaving cream to remove foundation stains.
- Use bread to remove lipstick stains.
- Use a nail file to buff away dirt from shoes.
- Use hairspray to remove pen stains.
- Use old tights to remove deodorant stains.
- Use salt to get rid of red wine stains.
The first hack I tried was the using shaving cream to remove foundation stains.
So this seemed like a lot of hard work, and I was pretty sceptical, but this really works.
I stained the top with a lot of foundation and I got most of it off, surprisingly. You do have to really rub the foam in, but just look at how effective it is. I would actually use this hack again, especially for times when I get a little foundation on my clothes while getting ready. All in all it took about 5 minutes, including waiting time, to get the stain off.
After the success of the first hack, I was really starting to believe in the power of hacks. So I tried the hack that promises to remove lipstick stains with bread.
What do we have here, this also works.
FYI you will get bread crumbs everywhere, but it's actually worth it. This hack doesn't remove the stain completely, but if you look at the picture you can see a very noticeable difference. It's something worth doing before washing your clothes, because lipstick stains, especially matte lipstick stains, don't always come off in the wash.
Next I tried using a nail file to buff away dirt from my shoes.
As you can these shoes have been through it, so I was really hoping this worked.
Does it work? Yes. But you are essentially ruining your shoes, by buffing away the dirt you are also buffing away the material on your shoes. It's not a noticeable ruin, but I think I will give this on a miss next time. Maybe it's time to get rid of these shoes.
The next hack was to use hairspray to remove pen stains.
This also works.
So this trick floored me a little, it worked really well.You can still see a little stain, but if I had carried on rubbing this would be gone. I was so shocked by this I had to find out the science behind it. So here it is, hairspray has alcohol in it, which is the ingredient that gets stains off. So if you are going to trying this, use a hairspray loaded with alcohol, it might dry out your hair, but it will remove ink stains from your clothes.
Next up was the tights and deodorant hack.
Well this is the best damn trick ever!
So this hack gets rid of deodorant stains effectively and quickly. What a life saver! It doesn't involve any cleaning or much effort. I don't know if it will remove older stains, but it works brilliantly on fresh stains.
Spilling red wine on my clothes is something that happens a lot more often than it should. I just seem to miss my mouth after a glass or two. So I was very keen to try the salt and red wine hack.
LOL! It doesn't work at all. Save your salt, put stained clothes in the wash and hope for the best.
Maybe this works better on small stains, maybe?