When you spill something on your shirt, you may do what I’ve always done, put some water on it and scrub a little.
You’re doing it wrong!
I learned why that is wrong when I headed out to the P&G Labs earlier this month. Yep, I learned, directly from the awesome peeps at Tide how to remove stains….and it works!
What you need:
- Water
- Tide (okay, any laundry detergent will work, but honestly, Tide works better…I’ll explain why later!)
What to do:
- Take the article of clothing and turn it inside out. I know, when you are out and spill on your shirt, pants, this won’t work, but work with me.
- Put a little water on it, from the back side. This will help to push the little particles of whatever you spilled to get away from the clothing fibers. When you put water on the outside of the clothing, you might push the stain further into the clothing fibers, making it harder to get out! Who knew, right?
- Put a little detergent directly on the stain and rub it in.
- Let it sit for a few hours, or even over night. This will help the detergent to work on breaking up the oils and things in your stain.
- Wash as you normally would.
Okay, so you want to know why Tide works better than most other detergents? I learned all about it! Tide has these things called sufactants. What these do is break up the particles that create the stain and don’t allow it to reattach to the clothing fibers.
I didn’t really understand it or believe how it worked. We tested it. Two bottles were side-by-side. Each had the same amount of water and we put 10 drops of chile oil in each. Then a small amount of Tide was put in one and another brand was put in the other. I know the other brand but can’t say what it is, but it is a cheaper brand that I had often used, but won’t again. Both bottles were covered and shaken up. The bottles were sat down and looked the same, oil was all throughout the water. As they sat for a while you could see the oil begin to rise to the top of the water in the bottle with the “value” detergent. The bottle with Tide never created the oil film and the oil stayed separated and broken down.
I had been using a value detergent or my homemade detergent to wash our clothing, and thought it was doing a good job. I won’t use it anymore. We switched to Tide Pods and our clothes look better, feel better and smell better.
Now you know how to really remove stains from you clothing, and why it works. :)
About Amber
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