Green food coloring makes Hulk angry!

June 21, 2006 11:03 AM

My 3 year old just dumped green food coloring all over our dining room... HELP!

So, yep, we have green food coloring all over the dining room now, all over my son, all over his clothes, all over the cherry table, and the rug.

What should we do? How can we get this out? Will it stain the wood?

posted by gregvr to Home & Garden (6 answers total)

advice from ye olde internet about food coloring on a wood floor, which i doubt is so much different than a table:

Food coloring is a dye. Wood floors with adequate finish to seal the wood should not have allowed the food coloring to pass through to wood. If finish is thus worn, then perhaps blotting food coloring with chlorine bleach will lift the dye stain. If not, then it will be permanent until floors are sanded and refinished if you have a surface coating like polyurethane. If you have a waxed finish floor, then sand with fine sand paper, re-wax, and buff.

there's a lot of mentions of various stain removal methods from various surfaces all over google
posted by soma lkzx at 11:19 AM on June 21, 2006

Oxyclean should get it out of his clothes--we use food coloring to dye things all the time, and my kids aren't too careful with it. A good soak in a hot water/Oxy solution does the trick. You can use the same solution to sponge it off the rug (test a spot first, some wool rugs will bleed).

As for getting it off of him, soap and scrubbing and time.
posted by padraigin at 11:35 AM on June 21, 2006

My dog ate a blue pen in my living room (looked like a blue gunshot crime scene). The pen company recommended a product called Amodex.

Worked wonderfully.
posted by jmevius at 11:39 AM on June 21, 2006

Try Oxyclean first. Get the powder and not the pre-mixed spray/liquid stuff. If that doesn't work then use Amodex.
posted by ChazB at 1:12 PM on June 21, 2006

Wow. I hope you post the results. Very curious how to get food coloring out.
posted by GIRLesq at 10:59 PM on June 21, 2006

Response by poster: It was actually a LOT easier than I thought.

Food coloring appears to be completely different than ink or colorfast dye. It just didn't seem to stick to anything... EXCEPT SKIN.

I just wiped it up off the cherry table. No big deal. Same with the wood floor.

The only one that was at all hard was the carpet. It's a fairly dark carpet [bought in expectation of small children!] I just had to go through a roll of paper towels sopping it up. Even on the lighter sections, it just came right up, it's just that there was a fair amount of diluting and pressing needed...
posted by gregvr at 9:25 AM on June 28, 2006