Remove Permanent Magic Marker from Clothes Using Whole Milk

My daughter came home yesterday with pink permanent magic marker stains on the sleeve of one of her favorite shirts.  This was not a cheap shirt.  My wife was not happy and my daughter was in tears because it was a Frozen themed shirt with Elsa and Anna on it, her favorite characters right now.  My first inclination was to start looking for a replacement because it seemed unlikely that this shirt would ever be OK to wear again.

Several family members and friends offered remedies that seemed completely farfetched, but given my reluctance to spend money on an article of clothing that we already purchased once, I decided it was worth at least giving them a try.

The option that was least likely to work, in my opinion was to soak the shirt in milk, but as it turns out, it was the solution that kept me from having to go out shopping for Frozen shirts.

We took a cereal bowl, which has seen its fair share of milk and filled it almost completely full with whole milk straight from the refrigerator.  There were pink stains around the cuff and also higher on the sleeve, but we decided to start small and just soak the first two or three inches of the sleeve and see what happened.  To our surprise, within minutes, the milk had already started turning a faint shade of pink.  We let the whole arrangement sit overnight.

The next morning, my wife checked on the shirt and noticed that the bowl of milk was almost empty.  We don't own a cat. so it seems that the shirt was rather thirsty and soaked the milk up slowly.  Fortunately, we positioned the shirt and bowl in the center of the counter so that it didn't get too heavy and fall off the side pulling the bowl with it.

Amazingly, the permanent marker stains were about 95% gone.  There was a slight mark left, but it so faint, it was almost unnoticeable.  The worst stains had completely disappeared.  Of course, the next step was to immediately wash the shirt so that my daughter didn't smell like sour milk the next day at school.  So today, I learned an important lesson: If you have a bad stain and nothing else will clean it, try whole milk.  You may be as pleasantly surprised as we were.