Let me tell you a little story. I have always painted my toes in my living room. Always! I enjoy being able to watch T.V. and paint my toes. They dry to a perfect finish and nothing out of the ordinary happens. Until this crazy thing happened and I was left shocked and speechless. This nail polish you see there on the carpet is Revlon Cherries in the Snow. It is such a pretty color and I loved it even more that I was able to find it at 75% off at CVS last year. Did I also tell you that Cherries in the Snow is very and I mean very liquidy for a polish. Some nail polishes are thicker than others and this one just so happen to have the consistency of water.
I can't even tell you how it happened because it happened so quickly that I just stared at the mess for like 5 seconds before springing into action. I do not even understand how it made the mess that it did, when it fell it seemed to just go everywhere and it pooled in one section. After my shock, I ran to get paper towels and just started blotting the carpet. The carpet after being blotted looked like this.
Yes, I know it looked like I killed someone in my living room but the only thing I killed was my carpet along with my sense of smell. (I thought how am I telling my husband that we need to either replace the carpet or have it professionally cleaned)? And mind you, my carpet color is light beige! Do you see that little bottle of nail polish remover? That is a small Target brand bottle of acetone. After noticing that blotting with acetone and paper towels was not going to do I went for my phone and started taking pictures and of course searching the net to see how I was going to clean this mess.
There are a lot of different ways I found to clean it, with most of the techniques recommending not to pour acetone straight on the carpet. So I decided to compile my own method and I gathered my own supplies.
You will also need acetone, hydrogen peroxide and lots and lots of paper towels. Also note, I have a personal carpet cleaner that I used as well.
Start by blotting the stain and taking off as much as you can with just the paper towel. Blot away until the nail polish is no longer wet on the paper towel. Second, put some acetone on the paper towel and continue to blot. Some sites recommended not to pour acetone directly on to the stain because it can dissolve the carpet adhesive. I was desperate and went against those recommendations and poured.. Yes, the pouring helped especially on the one part where the nail polish had pooled for 5 seconds. By this time open your windows, your doors because it's going to smell a lot like acetone. If you can wear gloves because this process also dried out my hands big time. Don't think that it's going to come off in like ten minutes. Oh no, this second process took me three hours. Yes, three hours and I was still watching T.V. trying not to go crazy with the acetone smell. That little bottle of acetone did not last and I had to go out and buy 4 more large bottles at CVS all the while being carded because it's like cough syrup you can only buy so many at a time.
Ok, this is what it looked like after three hours of just blotting with acetone.
Not bad right, compared to the picture above. Let's also note that my carpet needed a good cleaning and I was going to clean it when it got really hot so that it could dry in a day. Well this little fiasco moved things up a bit.
At this point I was getting nervous again because I wanted to stain to magically disappear. So, in comes the hydrogen peroxide. I again poured a little to the stains and continued to blot with paper towels. After one hour of blotting with peroxide it looked like this.
Better right but still not where it needs to be. I went to bed exhausted and decided to tackle it in the morning. I felt confident enough that this was as good as it was going to get for today.
In the morning I decided to put some baking soda on the stains and pour some peroxide making a paste on the carpet and I started to scrub with that little brush that you see in the product picture. Before I scrubbed I let the paste sit there for about a min and then started to scrub. I do not have any pictures of that process but it made a heck of a difference. I let it semi dry and then I also put about a teaspoon of blue dawn in about 8 cups of warm water and began brushing again.
I let it semi dry again and by the afternoon I pulled out my carpet cleaner and used some simple green to clean the carpet. This is the final result.
I had not vacuumed the carpet because I was waiting for it to dry. My husband could not tell where I had spilled the nail polish which was my goal in the first place. Once I vacuumed it looked even better. You can still tell in the picture but it's 99% gone. I'm happy and I will now paint my toes in the bathroom where we have tile :)
This was just way too much work!
