I spilled bleach on my carpet, can that be fixed?  

Yes. With rare exception, we can can make bleached out spots disappear! We can match the color of your existing carpet and re-dye the missing color back into the bleached spots to match the original carpet color. We also neutralize the area first, including the under pad and surrounding area so that the bleach doesn't become activated again which would cause a repeated and "growing" color loss. All bleached spots are not alike. Clorox, used properly in the laundry and on hard surfaces is a great cleaning chemical and truly helps kill germs and remove stains. But it has no rightful place on or near carpet, even Berber carpet, no matter what a carpet salesman tells you.  

We have had customers who thought that Clorox could "brighten" and clean their whole carpet by putting the bleach in their home carpet cleaning machine. Bleach does not "bleach" out color evenly. The result in every case of "home bleaching" attempts has been an unnecessary and costly venture for the well meaning home owner. The carpet always winds up blotchy and very ugly. Before Color Your Carpet®, the home owner was faced with buying a whole new carpet. Yes, Color Your Carpet® can remove the bleach residue, neutralize the whole carpet eliminating any further color loss, and evenly restore the lost color by matching the original color or we can change the carpet to a brand new color. But our best advice is to keep all forms of bleach away from carpeted floors.

Bleach (Sodium Hypochlorite) has an extremely high pH rating. Any carpet with a high pH (alkaline) causes the carpet to become a magnet to dirt. Most chemicals used by carpet cleaners also have very high pH properties. Using those high pH chemicals properly requires a thorough rinsing afterward with a good low pH solution, sometimes called an "acid bath". An acid bath usually consists of hot water and "acidic" (a high breed vinegar) or citric (a high breed extract of a citrus fruit) acid.

Other types of bleach stains can be caused by medications and household products that contain Benzoyl Peroxide. For example, almost all acne medications contain this ingredient. Often we see surface color loss in the shape of hands. Teenagers forget to wash the acne medicine off their hands. Then they sit on the carpet, lean back and leave the residue on the carpet.

Or, they run up the stairs hitting the tops of the steps as they go. The result is a very slow color loss on the tips of the carpet fibers in very strange shapes. In one case, a teen had a very bad case of acne on his back. He would apply the medicine, proceed to "workout" on the carpeted floor, sweating and leaving large areas of the carpet to slowly fade from the medicine residue. Needless to say, we were able to help and re-dyed the whole room back to one even color. But after we explained to his Mom what had happened, his exercise was no longer performed on the carpet if he had applied any acne medication to his body.

Mom is not without guilt as far as carpet color problems go either. Hair dye, hair removal products, cosmetics, perfumes and over zealous cleaning experiments can result in carpet stains or carpet color loss.

Finally - NEVER use any "Oxy" type products such as OxyClean, Resolve, SpotShot, DD7 or others on your carpet!!! We are called to color correct thousands of carpets every month that have been subjected to these products.