handmade wardrobe: the lipstick stain saga
if you follow me on instagram, you would have seen last week that i finally accomplished what i had anticipated shortly after i cast off my darling strange brew sweater - i got a stain on it. and not just any stain - a lipstick stain! classic femme move, amirite?
before the disaster
while most of my skincare and cosmetics regime nowadays is filled with eco-friendly options, lipsticks are where i still draw the line. i love wearing lipstick, and in the same way that my wardrobe is “practical femme”, my make-up needs to also be practical femme. if i can’t eat a meal or drink or get through a workday or evening without worrying about whether my lipstick is going to transfer from my mouth to the rest of my face, i’m not wearing it. as a general rule, i’ve had good luck with revlon products thus far. are they great for my body or the environment? not really. do they transfer onto other things? yup. but when they do transfer, they do so cleanly, so at the end of the day even if my pout doesn’t look so vibrant, it’s still cleanly within my lip lines (i’m too lazy for lipliners) and my lips don’t feel super dry and it didn’t cost me $50 for a new tube (hellooooooo, drugstore femme).
the lipstick culprit and a swatch from the leftovers of my sweater
unfortunately, this is also the lipstick that has to be hand-wiped with a towel off of mugs at the queer coffee shop after it’s gone through the industrial dishwasher. so yeah, when i accidentally got a smudge on the sleeve of my sweater, i knew i had a problem. i put a shout out on instagram asking if anyone had any cleaning solutions and ended up with oodles! samson texted me separately and suggested i test them out on scrap wool before dealing with my sweater, which was brilliant, and so here we are, with a swatch covered in lipstick marks and five home remedies to test with surprising results. i would like to point out that i have not yet tested any of the brand-name products that were recommended to me - i didn’t have them lying around the house, and before spending money on something that may or may not work, i wanted to test out the home remedies. plus, i figured if one of them worked first, it would be more helpful for the rest of you too since you may not have access to specific brands depending on where you live.
post-remedy application, before washing
top left to right: baby wipe; vinegar & water; dawn, vinegar, & water; rubbing alcohol
bottom left to right: soap bar, untreated smudges 1/2/3
the remedies i did test were as follows:
baby wipe (a make-up remover wipe was suggested, and back in my theatre days we always opted for baby wipes because they did the best job at removing all types of make-up while also being gentle on our skin)
equal parts white vinegar and water
a squirt of dawn dish detergent, white vinegar, and diluted with water
rubbing alcohol
my all-purpose soap bar (decided last minute on a whim because i’d used it before as an emergency laundry bar and it worked well for that)
post-quick water wash after applying the remedies
to my honest surprise, the best remedy was the soap bar! followed next by the baby wipe, with the remaining solutions basically just creating bigger messes. while i would love to just say that my soap bars are magic and it’s that simple, i actually suspect that the reason it worked so well is because of something a number of you suggested - the oils in the cold-compressed soap helped to counteract the oils in the lipstick. i’d be curious if any of you test out different cold-compressed soaps and come up with the same results.
so there you have it! i still need to tackle my actual sweater, but if in the end all else fails, i’ll just move on to the next suggestion, which was to do some visible mending on top of the affected spot!