I Made My Dingy, Stained Kitchen Towels Look New Thanks to This “Gentle” Cleaner

published Sep 24, 2022
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Credit: Joe Lingeman

Here’s the thing about dish towels: You want to choose the cutest ones that look amazing displayed in your kitchen. But when you actually use them to wipe down grime, they start to look dingy — and, as a result, so does your whole kitchen.

If you don’t attack the food stains fast enough, your once-cute towels might never look the same. So what do you do? You buy new towels, and the whole cycle begins again. 

That is, unless you invest in a trusty stain remover that can apparently do it all, like Forever New’s Stain Remedy. Never heard of it? A little background: Forever New is a laundry care company that’s been around since 1975. Unlike many laundry products on the market, Forever New focuses on cleaning your clothes and protecting longevity with gentle ingredients (hence the name).

The brand’s popular Stain Remedy Gel is supposedly effective on the toughest spots and spills — think: food residue and grease — and it has a near-perfect Amazon rating to prove it. The unscented product even says it can tackle blood, coffee, cosmetics, grass, and wine!

Credit: Ashley Abramson

I trust my fellow Amazon customers when it comes to the legitimacy of household products. Plus, I’m in the laundry room several hours a week battling my family’s mounds of dirty laundry, so I figured I’d be remiss not to give it a try.

Credit: Ashley Abramson

My most desperate items that need stain help right now? White dish towels that look great hanging in my kitchen but are saturated with every single bit of grime and gunk I wipe with them.

I chose two dish towels to test. One had week-old tomato sauce and curry stains, and the other had set-in brownish discoloration from who-knows-what. I followed the instructions on the back of the label: shaking up the bottle, applying it directly to the stain, and then using the built-in brush to gently scrub.

Then, I let the treated stains sit for two minutes and washed the towels in cold water for a normal cycle. (The label recommends using Forever New laundry soap, but I didn’t have any, so I used my normal detergent: Tide Free & Gentle.)

After 45 minutes, it was time to move the laundry to the dryer. I did a quick once-over of the offending towels, and they looked A LOT better than when I started. The after drying results, I knew, would be the true test.

Credit: Ashley Abramson

Would you believe it if I told you the towels were like new once I pulled them out? Not only were the stains invisible (yes, even the old ones), but they also felt so much softer and looked so much brighter than before. And all without too much elbow grease!

I’ll be honest: At first, I was a little discouraged after scrubbing the towels with the stain remover, because the discoloration wasn’t budging. I wondered if a product centered on its gentleness could remove some of the toughest (and oldest) kitchen stains, and on white towels, nonetheless.

My verdict? I’ll definitely be keeping Forever New’s stain remedy around — and I might even add the laundry soap to my rotation, too.

How do you keep your kitchen towels looking good? Tell us your ideas and product suggestions in the comments below.