Dr. Bronner's Castile Soap & The White Jacket

  It started with strange black pit stains on my sheer white jacket/cover from Ashley Stewart. Turns out, the black dress I wore to a funeral bled out in the armpits of the jacket. Rain poured down in buckets that day, and I was soaked from head to toe. When I came home, I threw the still moist thing over "something" (I honestly didn't look at it. It was my old HP computer I use to play TS1. It's got...dried brown stuff on the side...) and flopped into bed for an afternoon nap. Days later, I noticed the pit stains and some weird brown stains all over one side.

HORROR.

  This is a sheer Spring/Summer-type jacket thing that's just gorgeous. Short sleeves, with delicate stitching and that dramatic, slanted effect at the bottom. Very femme, very hard to find. (Also, very easy to stain and make holes on this thing.) Imagine my devastation when I went to wash off the black stains and found BROWN splotches all over one side. My usual stint of Southern-taught hand scrubbing wouldn't do!

  I did a quick vigorous scrub with a sink full of peppermint castile soap on the stains. I scrubbed for about ten minutes on each part. It got the black pit stains out, but the brown stuff was still there in faint patches. I decided to let everything soak in warm, soapy castile soap water for about 40 minutes. When I came back, I was 100% blown away--all the stains were gone. ALL OF THEM.

  It says right on the bottle that this stuff is a "household cleaner". (If you have time, read the bottle. There's stuff ALL OVER the bottle.) Aside from being very peppermint-y, I use this stuff to wash my face, my hair, and makeup brushes. It's an 18-in-1 type deal with a lot of organic punch. I realize the smell of Dr. Bronner's might be off-putting to some, but it works. It's magic in a bottle. The website says this about their liquid soaps:

"Completely biodegradable and vegetable-based, our Castile Liquid Soaps have been called the "Swiss-army knife" of cleaning - usable for just about any cleaning task. These simple, ecologically formulated soaps are gentle enough for washing body, face or hair, but also powerful enough for tasks like dishwashing, mopping, laundry and even pest control. Different tasks call for different dilutions of the soap." 

  We're prone to using detergents and soaps, "just because". When I saw my beloved jacket come out as white as snow, I realized what I needed to be using all along for my hand washables--Dr. Bronner's! A good scrub and a long soak will do your clothes all the good in the world. It seems that all the oils and stimulants combat stains and grease very well.

  I was happy to get those stains out. It's very hard, sometimes, to find replacements for articles of clothing you've become attached to. There are pieces in my wardrobe that cannot be replaced. Once it's their time to go, you bet I'll be having some kind of clothing funeral. They are near and dear pieces that are "timeless" no matter what year it is. So, of course I wanna take care of 'em! It's good to know I've got something to use when I need to hand wash! I never really thought about using this soap for my laundry until about a year ago. Sometimes hand washing with detergent works, and sometimes it's a fruitless effort leaving me with dry hands. With this stuff, at least I know my clothes come out clean, and my hands might be a little more moisturized!

  Dr. Bronner's actually has a lot of different scents to choose from. Peppermint is the least abrasive, but Rose and Lavender scent are heavenly. There's also a lot of different sizes to choose from, and they're pretty affordable. His grand-daughter, Lisa hosts a websites full of helpful hints and ideas to use with said soaps.