The concept of a spot cleaner is that it is applied directly to the stain on the garment by mechanical action (rubbing). The idea is that the chemical permeates deeper into the fabric and has a more profound effect in terms of stain removal than a spray on product does.
Three of the products on the market in this category are SARD Wonder Stick, Euco Fresh, Orange Power sticky spot and goo remover, and Stain Removal Kit.
Interestingly enough, these products didn’t exist twenty years ago, as they weren’t needed – Preen and SARD did the job. They only exist now because of the anaemic formulas used by the premium branded spray-on prewashes, and their inability to remove all but the weakest stains.
For the SARD and Euco Products, the principle of operation stems back to the introduction onto the market of SARD Wonder Soap. At the time, thanks to Preen, people had become accustomed to just spraying on a prewash and expecting stains to come out.
With SARD Wonder Soap, there was absolutely nothing remarkable about the soap itself, they just told you to apply it directly onto the stain. The success of the product was 100% marketing. If Sunlight had thought of it first, they could have called it Sunlight Wonder Soap. The interesting thing about this whole campaign is it that it deliberately and specifically turned the clock back to the pre-Preen days to capture a market who were not old enough to remember the days when elbow grease was the norm.
So the SARD Wonder Stick and Euco Fresh simply use this principle – rub the product directly onto the stain and pop it in the wash. Both formulas contain surfactants and eucalyptus oil. The eucalyptus oil serves a dual role, much like d-limonene (section 5.11), in that it is both an oil dissolving solvent and a pleasant smelling substance. In this context, it is similar to the original Preen and SARD formulations but with one important difference – it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t wash out completely. With the older type solvent based prewashes, complete washout was critical if you didn’t want the clothes to have an industrial type of smell afterwards. With eucalyptus oil or d-limonene, however, this is not a problem – some residual solvent will give the clothes a pleasant smell.
And d-limonene is the active ingredient in the Orange Power product, which is a very serious formula that contains no water, and is entirely comprised of d-limonene type products, surfactants, and ethanol (which aids penetration into the fibres).
The Stain Removal Kit uses a different principle again – three separate products are used. One targets food stains, one targets oils, and one targets inks and dyes. Unlike the other two products, however, this product is not a prewash as such, but a spot remover. Stains are removed simply by dissolving the stain in the product and blotting it out with absorbent paper placed below the product. This performance is, however, easily mimicked by the use of the appropriate solvent.