Hair dye is amazing stuff. You can change your whole look in an afternoon and give yourself a brand new vibe, full of confidence. The problem with hair dye is, it’s designed not to wash out.
This is great for making sure your hair stays the color you want it, but it’s bad news for any surfaces you might get it on by mistake!
This is a nightmare if you have hardwood floors. While all hardwood flooring is designed to be hard-wearing and durable, wooden floors are naturally porous.
This means that if you get hair dye on your hardwood floor, you need to make sure you act quickly to get it up, otherwise it’s going to soak into the wood.
Spills are unfortunately an inevitable part of life, and while you can take precautions like putting down towels and, of course, being very careful while applying hair dye, you might still get some dye on your floor by accident.
Thank goodness for these cleaning tips! Hair dye on your hardwood floor doesn’t have to be a disaster. Simply try these methods and you’ll have a clean floor again in no time.
The Power Of Baking Soda
Baking soda is going to feature heavily in these methods. It’s a household cleaning staple that is exceptional at cleaning up stains from spills, and you can combine it with a variety of other cleaning agents to get better results.
Baking soda is such a good cleaning agent because of two main properties. Firstly, it’s a mild abrasive so it lightly scours any surface when it’s not dissolved in water, and gives any cleaning solution it is part of a little extra scrubbing power.
Don’t worry, it’s gentle and won’t damage your hardwood floors! The other advantage of baking soda is that it is a mild alkali, which helps dirt and grease dissolve and lift away.
Add in the fact that it acts as a deodorizer and it’s clear why baking soda is a miracle cleaner, and why it would be good for tackling hair dye spills.
Method One – Baking Soda, Detergent, And Water
For the first of our ways of removing hair dye from hardwood floors, make a solution of baking soda, laundry detergent, and water. You’re going to want to make sure you have a fair bit of it because it’s all about saturating the stain, not scrubbing it in.
We’re talking about a tablespoon each of baking soda and laundry detergent mixed well into two cups of warm water. Having the water warm ensures that you’re going to fully dissolve the mixture.
Once you’ve prepared your solution, you’re going to need to grab a clean cloth. Soak the cloth in the solution and gently scrub at the hair dye mark. While the scrubbing is important for getting the solution and the hair dye to mix, what you’re really working with here is saturation.
The more of the solution that’s being agitated into the hair dye the better, because it gives more of a chance for the dye to mix with the baking soda and detergent and lift away.
This doesn’t mean you should pour the solution all over your floor, but keep that cloth nice and wet, squeezing it out frequently and repeating the process until all of the hair dye has been lifted off your floor.
Method Two – Baking Soda And Vinegar
A classic pairing, as an alkaline/acid combination baking soda and vinegar combine to produce powerful cleaning results.
With this mixture, what you’re looking to achieve is a gently abrasive and reactive substance that scrubs the floor and takes up the hair dye as part of the neutralizing reaction taking place between the baking soda and vinegar.
For this method, make a paste with equal parts baking soda and white vinegar.
You want it to be a good, pliable texture that doesn’t run and that you can scoop up with a cloth. Once you’ve got your paste, apply some to a cloth, about a teaspoon’s worth, and then rub it into your stain.
Go gently and work it into the floor using circular motions. As you use up the paste, add more to your cloth and keep going until the stain has lifted. Give your floor a wipe with some warm clean water once you are finished.
This method can also be performed with lemon juice in place of the vinegar, which has the added benefit of making your floor smell of lemons!
Method Three – Peroxide And Baking Soda
Okay, this one is a little extreme. If you haven’t managed to get the stain out with more gentle methods, this might be where you end up. Hydrogen peroxide, as you’re probably aware, is a great cleaning agent but also functions as a bleach.
It is very good at removing color from places it shouldn’t be, but unfortunately just as good at removing it from places it should be!
If you’re trying this out, make sure you test it on a patch of floor that you don’t see (under some furniture or a plant pot for example) to make sure it doesn’t bleach your wood too.
Once again, you’re going to make a paste, this time one part peroxide to one part baking soda. Apply the paste to a dry cloth and gently scrub the floor where you have spilled the hair dye. Reapply paste to your cloth as it runs out, and continue until the stain has fully lifted from the floor.
As with the baking soda and vinegar method, follow this intensive clean up with a warm water wash to remove any residual cleaning paste and leave your floor super-clean.
Conclusions
While there are a bunch of commercial cleaning products on the market for hardwood floors, none of them target stubborn stains like hair dye as well as a good old-fashioned baking powder remedy.
Bear these simple methods in mind for the unfortunate and inevitable spills, and you’ll have no reason to worry.