No more grungy armpit stains!

I get horrendous pit stains on my white shirts.  There, I said it.  Embarrassing, I know, but it is what it is.  I guess it has something to do with the aluminum in antiperspirants. So while perusing One Good Thing by Jillee (one of my favs!) one day, I found this article.  It claimed that Dawn dish soap+ hydrogen peroxide+ baking soda would eliminate those grungy stains.  And, quite frankly, the before and after’s were pretty convincing.

I was skeptical, though. It couldn’t possibly work any better than straight bleach.  There’s no way!  So I decided to put it to the test. 

I had the perfect test subject in mind.  I had a shirt I planned to wear for a future outfit post and I couldn’t make myself commit to it because the shirt had such awful pit stains.  So I decided I would scrub one side with Jillee’s concoction and one side with trusty ole’ bleach. Here are the pictures of the shirt before any scrubbing took place:

Poor quality picture, I know, but hopefully you get the idea.  Its pretty bad.  Why did I even hold on to this shirt for so long? 

The original article called for one part Dawn mixed with two parts Hydrogen Peroxide.  Jillee added some baking soda for some extra scrubbing power, which only makes sense to me, so I did, too.

I slathered on the products and went to town scrubbing for a minute.  I didn't see the “magic” happening like the original article claimed, but Jillee said she waited an hour before washing them and she was pleased so I waited.  A little while.

Then, I remembered from another article of hers that she said the sun acts as a natural bleach alternative.  Thinking I might be able to combine the whitening powers, I hung my shirt in the window.

I’m bummed I didn’t get a picture of the next part, but if you saw it, you’d understand how frantic I was.  It turned purple.  PURPLE!  Apparently the combination of sunshine on the bleach reacts and produces the brightest shade of purple.  Not sure why, but it does.

I freaked out and threw it in a rinse cycle praying desperately that the purple wouldn’t stain.  Well, my prayers were heard and the shirt came out fine. However, I hadn’t let the concoction sit for more than about 20 minutes so the pit stains were still pretty obvious.  So I reapplied both the stain fighters and, this time, let them sit for plenty of time.  After that, I ran it through a regular wash cycle with regular detergent and my shirt came out like this:

Pretty outstanding, huh?  The miracle cleaner side looks quite a bit better than the bleach side.  I was totally wrong, but I’m okay with that because now I have the cure-all for grungy underarm stains. Only now I have to go fix the bleach side so that it will match its partner.