How To Easily Remove Nail Polish From Carpet

So, you know I love nail polish and have been collecting bottles for years.  I’ve even showed you how I perfectly swatch my nail polish bottles & organize my Julep collection. But, I’ve always been able to keep it where it was supposed to be, and I’ve never needed to know how to remove nail polish from places that it wasn’t supposed to be.

Last week, my 21 month old daughter found my nail polish collection interesting as well.  She made her way into my closet, opened a few of the nail polish drawers, and proceeded to open & dump several bottles.  Apparently, she thought the carpet needed a little color & sparkle.

Big Sigh.

Thankfully, this isn’t carpet that I really care about.  It was here when we bought the house.  When we remodeled our closet last year (we’re still putting the finishing touches on it), we prepped this space for hardwoods by putting down subfloor over the slab.  Then, we recut the existing carpet to fit the new space.  Someday soon, we’re going to put the hardwoods down in here and this carpet will go bye bye.  However, since that’s not going to happen for a while, I needed to figure out a way to remove the nail polish from the carpet as best I could.

But I was seriously freaking out.

I quickly got some paper towels and used an entire brand new bottle of nail polish remover to try and get as much of the goopy polish up as I could.  Of course, I rubbed, even though I know you never ever rub stains on carpets.  It’s just one of those things you have to do, right?  You’re just compelled to rub the stain.  Everybody does it.

The next step was to do what anyone who has a problem they need to solve does, turn to Pinterest.

I found this pin saying that I could get the polish out of the carpet completely with 3 things: Barbasol Shaving Cream, Acetone, and a Scrub Brush.  The Barbasol sounded ridiculous, but I didn’t have many options.  So I took a trip to Target to collect the supplies.  It cost about $7.  I already had the scrub brush.

Once home, I put the Barbasol all over the splotches, let it sit for a couple of minutes, and then poured some acetone on top.  The acetone eats through the shaving cream a bit, so then I scrubbed with my OXO scrub brush.

I made sure to scrub in all different directions to try to get the acetone down in the fibers.  I kept adding acetone to the spots, and it was helping to get the stains out, but they were deep down in the fibers of the carpet, near the base.

So while I could get the polish out of the top surface of the carpet, it still had a darker shadow of color at the bottom.  The picture above is what it looked like after the first round, which lasted about 15 minutes.

I repeated the process two more times, and scrubbed some more.

And it worked.

Unbelievable!

The after pic looks a little dark, but that’s from vacuuming.  The dark spots from the polish are gone.  It looks like it never happened.  It’s hard to tell in pics, because this carpet has all different colored fibers in it, but you can’t tell at all in person.  It’s amazing!

There is one thing I want to add to the supply list.  It’s probably a good idea to wear a respirator.  The acetone gives off nasty fumes that you don’t want to breathe in.  Also, turn on your closest exhaust fan (ours is in the bathroom) or open a window.  Or both.  If you have a Box Fan, use that as well.  Our closet is interior and has 1 HVAC vent, and it took a couple of days for the smell to go away.

Also, you might want to wear gloves.  The acetone can be harsh on your skin.

All in all, I used about half a can of Barbasol, and almost the entire bottle of acetone.  Looking back, using this trick to easily remove nail polish from my carpet was a piece of cake.  I will no longer freak out about spilled polish on the carpet.  It’s an easy fix!

I hope you never need this quick little tip to easily remove nail polish from carpet, but just in case you do, I made a Pin for you!

Just pin that to your Cleaning Tips Pinterest Board, because you’ll never know when you’ll need it!

It’s been a while since I added to my Pinterest Projects Series.  It was a series of blog posts that I started 5 or 6 years ago where I tried things I saw on Pinterest and reported back if they worked or not.  This one works!