Okay, so let me tell you, dealing with red lipstick on a perfectly good white shirt? It’s the worst. Seriously, it happened to me last weekend, and I thought that shirt was a goner. My favorite one, too, naturally. Just a big, bold, red smear right where everyone could see it. Fantastic.
My first reaction was, of course, mild panic. I grabbed a wet cloth, thinking, “I’ll just dab this out.” Wrong. So wrong. It just sort of… smudged it into a bigger, fainter, but somehow more permanent-looking mess. I almost threw the shirt in the bin right then and there. I remember my aunt once told me hairspray was the magic cure for ink, so I thought, “Lipstick, ink, same difference?” Sprayed a bit on. Let me tell you, that did absolutely nothing helpful. Just made it smell like cheap hairspray.
So, here’s what I ended up doing, after my little meltdown.
I was rummaging under the kitchen sink, muttering to myself, probably looking like a complete lunatic. I found some of that heavy-duty dish soap, the kind that claims to cut through grease like nobody’s business. I thought, “Well, lipstick is kinda greasy, right?” It was worth a shot, better than the hairspray disaster.
Here’s the play-by-play of what I actually did that worked:
- First off, I took a dull knife, like a butter knife, and very, very gently scraped off any lipstick that was still sitting on top of the fabric. You don’t want to grind that stuff in deeper, believe me.
- Then, I put a clean paper towel under the stain, inside the shirt, to stop it from bleeding through to the other side. Learned that one the hard way with an ink stain years ago.
- I squirted a tiny bit of that dish soap directly onto the red mess. Not a whole lot, just enough to cover it.
- I let it sit for a good 15 minutes. Made a cup of tea, tried to forget about the potential tragedy unfolding on my countertop.
- After that, I took an old toothbrush – a clean one, mind you! – and gently, and I mean gently, scrubbed the spot in little circles. I could see the red starting to break up. Victory was in sight!
- Then, I rinsed the area with cold water, from the back of the fabric, pushing the stain out, not further in. This part felt like it took forever, but I kept at it.
- The stain looked mostly gone, just a faint pinkish shadow. So, I threw the shirt into the washing machine with my usual detergent, on a normal cycle, but with cold water, just in case. I said a little prayer to the laundry gods.
And you know what? It bloody worked! The shirt came out spotless. I held it up to the light, checked it from every angle. No lipstick. I was genuinely amazed. I’d pretty much resigned myself to losing that shirt, especially after my genius hairspray idea.
So yeah, that was my little battle with the dreaded red lipstick. No fancy stain removers bought from a special store, just good old dish soap and a bit of patience. Sometimes the simplest things are the best, eh? Or maybe I just got lucky. Either way, my white shirt lives to see another day. And I learned that I should probably be more careful when I’m wearing white and someone’s rocking a bright red lip. Or maybe just carry dish soap in my purse. Kidding. Mostly.
