How To: Get nail varnish stains out of your carpet

After a monumental make-up clear out ended in disaster this week, I've learnt two very valuable lessons. One, how to remove even the darkest purple nail varnish from a pale coloured carpet, and two, that avalanching a mass of glass nail polish bottles from basket to basket will only end in disaster.

Let me set the scene: my wicker nail basket was overflowing. I had procured a new, larger and by all basket standards, better one, and so a transition had to take place. Rather than hand place them one by one however (there's a lot of nail polish over here), I decided to slowly 'pour' the bottles from old basket to new. Argh.

During this process one Bourjois purple polish suffered a fatal blow to the neck. Cue the slow leaking of dark violet vinyl finish onto the pale lavender carpet. An hour later I discovered the horror.

My first instinct was to douse it with nail polish remover, while taking tips from my flatmate and her boss via WhatsApp.

Yep that's the Airplane Mode icon. I wrote this on a flight to Sharm el Sheikh

Not only did remover not work, rubbing made it far, far worse. Next came an emergency text to my dad, the keeper of surprisingly useful and impressively varied snippets of random knowledge.

                                  

Yes people, shaving foam works. Here's what you do:

1. Cover the area with foam, no need to go overboard, but make sure it's totally covered.

2. Leave for at least 5 minutes, before using a damp cloth to wipe away the foam. Careful rubbing and three applications sorted out my stain, so don't be afraid to keep reapplying.

The full ins and outs of how/why it works is probably a whole other post, but what we can all take from this is that something in shaving foam (not gel, I don't know why) breaks down nail varnish, and for our purposes, that's a very news indeed!

Yep, shaving foam is great at removing nail varnish stains from carpet

Anyone else tried this? Or another nail polish stain remedy? Share below!