People Are Realising The 25p Secret To Removing Yellow Mattress Stains, And Cleaners Swear By It

It doesn’t matter how clean you are; everything from moisture to skin cells to lotions and hair products inevitably seeps into your mattress over time, oxidising and turning yellow. 

But what do you do when you spot the stains? Harsh products like bleach and sprays aren’t skin-safe and will simply soak through the stain anyway; professional cleaning is frankly too pricey for most. 

Well, according to TikToker and cleaning expert @homewithleanne, shaving foam might hold all the answers. 

How? 

In the caption of a video shared in June, the creator said that “shaving cream contains surfactants that lift stains, [emulsifiers] that remove oils, [and] foaming agents that help lift and remove the stain.”

She showed herself spraying shaving foam over a discoloured patch on her mattress, leaving it for an hour, and wiping the residue away with a damp microfibre cloth to reveal a newly-white surface underneath. 

Cleaning pro Mary Findley swears by the technique too, telling Better Homes & Gardens: “Liquids soak right through a mattress, not allowing sufficient time to dissolve the stain,” while “foaming shaving cream contains denatured alcohol, which is a stain remover, and it’s thick, so it sits on the surface to work on the stain.”

The surfactants in shaving cream have a water-loving head and some water-hating tails. The tail embeds itself in the lipids (fats) of grease and dirt, but because it’s still attached to the water-loving head, the whole set gets washed away in water. 

Considering you’d only need a couple of pumps of shaving foam ― which can go for 99p a bottle, meaning a fair few pumps would set you back about 25p ― that’s not a bad return for your buck, right?

People were pretty impressed by the trick 

In the comments of @homewithleanne’s TikTok, one user wrote that they also use shaving foam on their bathroom floors to get rid of nasty smells. 

“You must remove this foam completely, or later, it’ll be worse than before” another commented (which is true ― ensure it’s dry and clean before lying on your mattress). 

“I could hug you right now,” another grateful TikToker shared beneath the video. Having tried it myself on my old mattress with pretty great results, I reckon I’ll be reaching for an embrace too...