How do I remove curry, turmeric and tomato stains?

Curry stains are two problems at once. The colour is curcumin or lycopene, a strong natural dye, and it arrives dissolved in oil, which glues it into the fibre. Treat only the dye and the grease holds it; treat only the grease and the yellow stays. The reason a curry mark often looks worse after washing is that the wash removed the grease and revealed the dye underneath.

What you'll need

• Washing-up liquid
• Oxygen bleach powder
• Cold running water
• A sunny windowsill or washing line (optional)

Step by step

1. Scrape off the solids first.A blunt knife or a spoon edge, lifting rather than pushing. Wiping spreads a curry stain to twice its size before you have started.
2. Rinse cold from the back of the fabric.Stain-side down under the tap so the water pushes the sauce back out rather than through. Cold, because tomato contains protein that heat will set.
3. Work washing-up liquid into the mark.Neat, rubbed in with a fingertip and left five minutes. This is the degreasing step, and skipping it is why the yellow will not move later.
4. Rinse, then look at what is left.You should now have a clean-edged yellow or orange dye stain rather than a greasy blob. That is the correct halfway point.
5. Soak in oxygen bleach.A scoop of oxygen bleach powder in warm — not hot — water, for several hours or overnight. Safe on colours in a way chlorine bleach is not.
6. Wash as normal for the fabric.Forty degrees with a biological detergent for cotton. Check the mark before it goes near a dryer.
7. Dry it in direct sunlight.This is the step that actually finishes a turmeric stain. Ultraviolet light breaks curcumin down, and a yellow shadow that survived everything else often disappears over a few hours on a line.
8. Repeat the sunlight rather than the chemistry.If a trace remains, rewet the area and put it back out. Two or three sunny afternoons beat any further product.

Tips

• Sunlight works through a window in summer, so a windowsill will do if there is no outside space. It just takes longer.
• On a white cotton tablecloth, oxygen bleach and sun together will usually clear a curry stain completely. On synthetics, expect a permanent trace — polyester holds oily dye tightly.
• Plastic containers stained orange by tomato sauce respond to the same trick: wash, then leave them on a sunny sill for a day.

Common mistakes

• Using hot water at the start — Tomato and many curry sauces contain protein and sugar as well as dye. Heat sets both and turns a removable orange mark into a permanent brown one.
• Skipping the washing-up liquid step — The dye is carried in oil. Until the oil is broken down, water and detergent cannot reach the colour at all, so every later treatment underperforms.

If it doesn't work

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