About The Stain Library

The Stain Library answers one question as precisely as we can: how do you safely get this stain out of this material?

Most cleaning advice online is written for the stain alone. Coffee behaves very differently on cotton, on wool carpet and on marble, and the wrong method on the wrong material does permanent damage. So every page here is built from a record that names both the stain and the material, and covers the mark whether it is fresh, dried or long set in.

How the site is built

Behind the pages is a database of stains, materials, cleaners and the relationships between them. Each material carries what it tolerates and what it does not: heat, acids, alkalis, solvents, bleach, abrasives and water. Each method declares the techniques it uses. Before a page can be published, those two things are checked against each other automatically, and a method that uses something the material cannot take is refused.

What we will not do

We do not claim to have tested these methods ourselves. Guidance here is researched from manufacturer instructions, care labels, recognised authorities, specialist references and the recurring experience of people who deal with these materials.

Where the evidence is thin, we say so rather than inventing a confident answer. If the finder has no reviewed record for your combination, it will tell you that instead of guessing, and the request goes on our research list.