Have you had a chance to use our Laundry Stain Removal Soap Stick? We have had excited customers reach out to us after successfully removing tough stains like cooking oil, coffee, and even blood with our soap stick.
Though the Laundry Stain Removal Soap Stick is quite the handy tool, occasionally we discover a stain that needs a little extra care. Our customer, Nina, asked for help with a tricky wine stain, and we were excited to dive right in. EXPERIMENT? We love experiments!
We grabbed a few reusable cotton bags, poured some red wine on them, and got started!
So - what did we discover?
Short Answer:
Our experimentation process led us to this easy, 3-step process as the best way to remove wine stains [short answer images taken from our how-to video for getting stains out at home. Scroll down for pictures from the experiment.]
Step 1: Rinse the stain and scrub it with our Laundry Stain Removal Soap Stick.
Step 2: Create an Oxygen Brightener solution and soak the stained cloth. Just how long you soak the cloth depends on how long you’ve waited to treat the stain.
You can soak it for up to 6 hours, though we have found that the stain is usually removed anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. You can read specific directions for Oxygen Brightener use in laundry by clicking here: How do I use Oxygen Brightener with my Laundry?
Step 3: Wash and dry as usual. Check stain before drying to make sure it's completely removed. Repeat steps 1 and 2 if needed.
Long Answer (for those who enjoy experiments as much as we do!):
In our first test, we stained 3 reusable cotton bags with red wine and left them to sit for 24 hours.
We washed these bags using three methods: regular machine wash with Laundry Powder, soap stick applied followed by a regular machine wash, and an Oxygen Brightener soak followed by a regular machine wash.
As you can see, varying levels of staining and red wine shadows remained on all three fabrics.
For our second test, we stained 1 reusable cotton bag with red wine and let it sit for 24 hours. After rinsing and scrubbing this bag with our Laundry Stain Removal Soap Stick, we soaked it in an Oxygen Brightener solution for an hour. Success! This completely removed the wine stain, leaving behind no shadowing.
This led us to wonder how long you could leave a red wine stain and still remove it successfully. Perpetually curious, we stained 6 more cloth bags and put them to the test.
Stain Set Test
First, We soaked 7 cotton bags in red wine for 1 to 7 days.
Then, we tested our Soap Stick, Oxygen Brightener, launder process on all 7 rags.
Conclusion:
This 3-step method, combining our Stain Stick and Oxygen Brightener as a stain pre-treatment, completely removes the wine stain up to 4 days after the original spill. However, after leaving a wine-stained cloth to sit for 5 days, the stain is no longer completely removable using our method. At this point in the process, it will leave behind a very faint shadow. On days 6 and 7 the shadow progressively gets a bit darker. While it is fine to wait a bit to treat a stain, longer waits could lead to less desirable results.