Dirt, perspiration, ring around the collar, and arm pit stains have a lot of protein in them but they are easily removed...... usually.
1. Check the fabric content of the garment. Cottons, polyesters and nylons and any blends of these can be washed and these stains should come out with just about any detergent and soft, hot water works best. Cool water should work if the detergent will dissolve in cool water. To make sure the soap/detergent dissolves put some in a clear glass of cool water and observe the soap. If it dissolves great, if not, get something that will or switch to hotter water. The main reason for detergent is to break the surface tension between soil and water. Water is a great solvent it will dissolve just about anything it can come in contact with. Now just about any protein can be removed with ammonia but it stinks. So it is not too popular, (Be careful not to allow chlorine and ammonia to come in contact with each other. Chlorine gas among other things can be released and it is deadly....seriously deadly.) But you can add it (the ammonia) to your detergent if it doesn't have chlorine in it. Phosphates are no longer available to lower the pH and soften the water but you can really boost the cleaning power of the detergent by using soft water. It is the single most best thing you can do to remove stains. I can also say that washing the clothing before too much time has passed (not letting it sit in a pile for a week) will do wonders for soil removal.
2. Wash the article of clothing using your favorite detergent/soap.
3. OK, so if it didn't come out in the wash, get out the ammonia, peroxide and the spotting brush. Use the ammonia first and tamp the stain (absorbent towel under the stain) then peroxide, heat it up, rewash. If the stain is oily, put a one or two drops of Dawn or other dish soap and tamp it
4. On men's collar stains (mostly body oils) you can and may need to scrub the fabric with the brush with ammonia and dish soap. Yellow under arm stains are difficult to say the least because of the deodorant and/or antiperspirant, but if you use these same things they can be removed.
Good Luck and let me know if this doesn't work for you.
The Fabric Doctor
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2 comments:
Okay, so I tried this on the collar of a dress shirt (how do they get so dirty anyway?), I should have come back here to read through the steps because I didn't do it exactly right but it worked great.
I just remembered the ammonia and Dawn, so I pre-treated the shirt collar with ammonia and some 'Dawnlike' detergent. I don't have a cool dry cleaning brush so I used an old toothbrush and massaged the mixture into the collar and threw it into the wash.
The collar came out great - in fact better than it's been for a while.
Thanks for the tip.
Oh, also ... Since I used it as a pre-treatment your post got me thinking. Would I have been better off to use something like Shout or a stainstick pre-treater and then doing this after or does it even matter? What kinds of stains should you pre-treat before washing?
peter you can always use commercial products they are really safe and many of them work well but you don't really need to pay the price.
Oils are the hardest thing to remove from fabrics with wet cleaning. Dry cleaning solvents work on oils the way water works on sugar. It is the chemical composition of the solvents that determins what they will or will not disolve. You could pretreat oil types before washed. That would include a lot of stains because almost all food has some oil in it. Vegetable oils oxidize quite quickly and become imposible to remove if enough time passes but if washed and not allowed to sit they should come out in warm water with a good detergent.
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