What was that?

Oh, you want to know what happens when your bottle of bleach leaks inside your laundry bag and gets on dark colored clothing?

Well I’m glad you asked, because I actually happened to have that experience a few days ago when I did my laundry.

I put all my pants and two jackets into a separate plastic bag because my main laundry bag was full. I also had laundry detergent, softener, and bleach to carry, and I unfortunately do not have three hands, so I threw all the bottles into the separate plastic bag. For whatever reason, the last time I did laundry, I thought it would be a great idea not to close the bleach container tightly.

The bleach slowly leaked out of the bottle and into the plastic bag. Of course, the plastic bag doesn’t have air filter holes in it like my other regular laundry bag does, so instead of leaving a small trail of bleach on the ground, it instead slowly pooled up at the bottom of the plastic bag, and got absorbed by my clothes.

It was a slightly tragic experience when I found out, and in panic, I threw them into the washing ma­chine as quickly as possible, hoping that somehow, water will restore the color.

… As expected, it didn’t.

After realizing that I had no idea what to do, I tweeted to my Twitter followers asking for help:

Help! How do I get bleach stains out of dark clothing?

— Adam (@Parkzer) March 19, 2012

I got a handful of random responses, such as scrubbing it with vinegar, bleaching the whole article of clothing so it becomes an entirely new color, or just leaving it as is. One of the responses I got was to use a permanent marker. At first I thought this was a troll suggestion (especially because it came from one of my friends), but after a while, I realized that it was actually probably the best suggestion.

I started with my black jeans. Fortunately, it was only a tiny spot, and it would be easy to color back in. Here are the before and after photos:

Even though the texture in that tiny spot is a little weird now, it actually turned out a lot better than I thought it would.

Next were my blue jeans. Again, the spot was pretty small. As I looked at the stain more, it seemed like I would be better off just leaving it, as it was way at the bottom where it wouldn’t be that noticeable, and it just looks like that portion of my jeans faded a lot faster than the rest.

Next up was one of my jackets. It’s normally a really dark shade of grayish blackish forest green, but the bleach stain turned some spots creamy orange.

The first spot was right up at the collar. I decided it would be fine to just leave it because it’s right at the edge where my shoulder would be, and if the collar flops down a litte, it’s covered up anyway.

The rest of the stains on my jacket were on the front down at the bottom. I considered filling them in with marker, but I decided that none of the colors I had would blend in that well. Also, because of the shape and placement of the stains, it doesn’t look as strange as it could have been.

There was one last article of clothing that got stained, and seeing this actually made me really happy. I was lucky enough that the article of clothing that absorbed most of the bleach was a pair of pants that I wear as pajamas.

Nice job taking one for the team, corduroy pajama pants.