Remove Yellow Mattress Stains With This Easy Shaving Cream Hack

Forgetting a wet towel, dropping a cup of tea while reading, or allowing an overly-excitable pet to snuggle in bed — never mind how they got there, almost everyone has a few stains on their mattress. Even if you've never had an accident occur on your bed, mattresses can still turn yellow all over due to unavoidable moisture buildup and rusting inner springs. Mattress stains and discoloration aren't usually a concern when sheets cover them up, but it can be embarrassing if someone happens to see the bare mattress (whose idea was it to make mattresses white anyway?). Luckily, an easy hack shared by TikTok creator Carolina Mccauley shows how to clean up mattress stains with one simple item you probably already have: shaving cream. Not only does shaving cream keep your skin soft, but it also contains denatured alcohol, which acts as a stain remover.  

However, yellow mattress stains can be notoriously tricky to remove, and it seems like half of the "solutions" out there really just spread the stain wider and deeper. So, do the foamy qualities of shaving cream have what it takes to be the perfect stain remover? Here's how Mccauley uses a generous dollop of shaving cream to whisk away mattress stains and other solutions brainstormed by her viewers. 

Carolina Mccauley, under the username @carolina.mccauley, posted a video on her TikTok page, where she shares a variety of home design, organization, and cleaning hacks. "Did you know that shaving cream can remove mattress stains?" a voiceover states in the video, "Just spray and leave for 20 minutes, then wipe the stain and dry." The beginning of the video shows a mattress with a distinct ring where moisture had clearly soaked in and dried at some point. Mccauley sprays a generous amount of shaving cream directly onto the bare mattress, spreading it gently with a towel to cover the whole stain. After what the viewer can assume is a brief timelapse, Mccauley wipes up the shaving cream with a fresh towel and dries the area with a hair dryer. The stain appears to have lifted considerably!

Of course, if you're going to try this hack at home, you should beware of the kind of shaving cream you reach for. Most shaving creams smell fresh and pleasant in general, but you may want to avoid any overly perfumed products that could go sour over time or annoy you while you're sleeping. By that same token, avoid shaving cream with added colors or dyes that could stain the mattress even more. 

Because Mccauley didn't give a close-up of the shaving cream results after they were dry, many viewers were skeptical that it actually worked. The video cuts short, but if you look very closely as Mccauley is drying the mattress, it seems like the stain has lifted and lightened a bit. However, the stain in the TikTok hack was relatively light already, suggesting that the shaving cream hack may not work so well on heavy stains from coffee, urine, blood, wine, or bed bugs. "Don't make me do this if it doesn't actually work. I'm that gullible," one commenter wrote. Another admitted that the hack could work, but only because "All it does is pushes the stain down to not be noticeable."

The only way to know for certain could be to try the hack out for yourself, but if you aren't willing to risk your mattress, commenters offered plenty of other practical solutions. A Hoover or Bissell upholstery cleaner, such as the "Little Green Machine," may be a worthwhile investment if the mattress has multiple stains or is likely to get stained again in the future. However, many people agreed that the best option is probably prevention. As one commenter put it, "Waterproof mattress cover! Problem solved! Then there's no stains to fix!"