More than a year ago, I had a colour run emergency. I’d tossed my Ken Done t-shirt into a pail to hand wash along with a red shirt. I left the clothes to soak for a while and when I came back to the laundry, I was aghast. The t-shirt had red patches everywhere. It was an umitigated disaster.

My first thought was to go to my neighbourhood laundrette as this was a t-shirt worth saving. It’d come all the way from Australia and was a gift from one of my cousins. Unfortunately, neighbourhood laundrette man said he couldn’t do anything about it and suggested I look for a product at the supermarket.

At Central Hypermarket, I scanned the shelves and came upon a few choices of colour run remover, the cheapest of them being this (can’t remember the price but it wasn’t too pricey):-

The box contains two sachets to remove most stains caused by non-fast colours running in the wash. This one is only for small or hand wash only articles and is safe to use on all white fabrics inclusing delicates such as wool and silk. It can also be used on white articles containing some colour, ideal for my t-shirt which has quite a bit of colour in front.

As each sachet is sufficient to treat up to 500g of fabric or two shirts, I emptied half a sachet with boiling water into the pail and immersed my t-shirt using rubber gloves. This stuff is super-duper strong, I could smell it from a distance away and refrained from breathing in the fumes when I was immersing my t-shirt.

The instructions call for the item to be soaked for an hour minimum and then rinse the article thoroughly and wash in the normal way. After an hour, I poured away the water and was so surprised to see the t-shirt had returned to its usual appearance, all traces of colour run had disappeared. It was amazing and that was when I was convinced this was the best product for removing colour runs.

This is the t-shirt in question:-

Runaway Colour Run Remover is also ideal for reviving whites but not for removing stains. A box contains 2 x 25ml sachets and product contains Sodium Hydrosulphite.