When I first began transitioning from commercial cleaning brands to one with more natural and non-toxic ingredients, one of the things I worried about was finding a good eco-friendly stain remover spray.

We had already been using a natural laundry detergent for about a year, somewhat in part because my husband developed a sensitivity to regular scented detergent. But, I mean, we had a baby, and a very messy one at that.

I didn’t want to constantly be buying new clothes and throwing out stained ones!

So, since we’d already had good success with Seventh Generation’s unscented laundry detergent, I decided to give the Seventh Generation Natural Laundry Stain Remover spray a try. And wow, was I impressed.

I want to be clear that I’m not being sponsored by Seventh Gen to write this post! (though this post does contain Amazon Affiliate links which cost you nothing but could earn me a very small commission. Click here to read more about it). And even if I were, this is the absolute honest truth: their spray n wash works perfectly.

 

Do you know how mainstream stain remover spray brands can sometimes be too powerful and leave a bleach mark where a stain used to be?

This happened recently to one of my husband’s favorite work shirts. He was in Vegas for a conference and noticed a small grease mark at the end of the day. He had received a stain remover pen as swag from the conference, and so he decided to use it on his shirt.

Big mistake.

It got the stain out all right. But also left a white bleach mark and totally ruined his shirt. Such a bummer.

 

In all the years now that I’ve been using this all natural laundry stain remover spray, it’s never once ruined a shirt.

In fact, it’s pretty much worked on every stain my kids have thrown at it. I’m talking like the classic TV commercial stuff: berries, dirt, grass stains, blood…you name it, we’ve had it on a piece of kids clothing!

My toddler has been going through a phase recently of not wanting to wear a bib anymore. Unfortunately she hasn’t quite mastered the art of eating without getting everything all over herself, so that means we’re going through a lot of laundry.

 

Then the other day, we had the perfect laundry storm occur.

Toddler. Wearing a light yellow shirt. Eating strawberries. Without a bib.

The horror!

Yes, as you can imagine, it was a total disaster. Well, from my perspective it was. From hers, she had completely succeeded in getting a decent amount of strawberries in her mouth, and was very satisfied with herself.

Unfortunately, this is what her shirt looked like afterwards:

 

 

After picking off the bigger pieces of mush and taking this photo, I sprayed the shirt down with my Seventh Gen eco-friendly stain remover. Following the directions on the back of the bottle, I saturated the stains with the liquid, and then gently rubbed the material together.

 

This part may seem counter-intuitive. You may feel like you’re rubbing the stain in further.

But somehow, this helps to activate the stain-fighting power, or something mysterious like that. I don’t make the rules. I just know it works so I do it!

By the way, do you know what a USDA Certified Biobased Product is? That means it’s made from renewable biological sources (e.g. plants) instead of petroleum-based products. So essentially, by buying products with this label you’re reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and positively helping our climate change crisis. Pretty decent return for a $5 investment!

 

Anyway, the instructions also recommend letting the stain remover sit in the clothing item for at least 5 minutes but no more than 24 hours.

I sprayed it with every intention of putting it into a wash at exactly five minutes and 1 second. This being real life however, I got distracted by something, which I then got distracted from by something else, and before I knew it, almost a full 24 hours had gone by!

So yeah, this stain had about 24 hours to set, but it also marinated in the stain remover liquid for that whole time too. Either way, once I had time to circle back to take care of it, I threw it in with a regular load and washed as I always do.

To be honest, I was actually a little afraid that I had overdone it with the smushing strawberries into the stain and that this experiment would fail miserably.

I mean, I had used this eco-friendly stain remover spray many many times before and knew that it worked. But wouldn’t it just be my luck if the one time I decided to document it, the spray n wash failed at its job?

 

So I was immensely relieved when I pulled the shirt out of the dryer and saw it looked like this:

 

Admit it, you didn’t think the stains would come out. I mean, I don’t blame you. They were pretty major. I tried to take both pics at the same time of day, on the same surface, and under the same lighting. The “after” photo came out a little lighter for some reason I can’t figure out. But if anything I think that would make any lingering stainage even more obvious….

 

But seriously, the stains all disappeared!

Best of all, even though the stain remover spray liquid had seeped into the Disney design at the center, it didn’t affect Mickey and Minnie’s teacup dance party in the slightest. Phew. I would’ve been pretty sad to retire this cute lil shirt. Thankfully we’ve got at least one more wear out of it in our future. : )

• cleaning
• Seventh-Generation