Condé Nast Traveler does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Any information published by Condé Nast Traveler is not intended as a substitute for medical advice, and you should not take any action before consulting with a healthcare professional. After this incident, I decided it was time to find a brand I could trust. And who better to test the products with me than good ol' mom—despite being a klutzy kid who left every dim sum meal with a shirt full of sauce stains, all I remember is perfectly pristine clothes thanks to a little magic touch from my mom. If fun is a factor, then Delta Carbona Push & Wipe wins by a landslide. These 1.5" circular pods contain two chambers, one to keep the 9" x 8.6" wipe dry and the other with the cleansing formula. When you’re ready to use it, push down on the perforated portion, which will reveal the wipe and release the liquid. Give it about 10 seconds and watch it grow, then remove and use.

We’ll be honest: We’ve been burned by stain remover pens before. They often dry up before we can ever use them and seem to smear the stain more than actually remove it. OxiClean changed our minds. While it—like most stain-fighters—struggled to remove the foundation, the little pen did a decent job removing the other stains. Even with some pretty intensive scrubbing, our tester found that it didn’t damage the fibers in the shirt at all.As with all of our tests, our criteria for judging stain removers includes some specs, objective criteria, subjective criteria and any “wow” factors we encountered. What form does this stain remover come in? Is it a liquid that spills everywhere? A gel that’s easy to manage?

When I pulled out the pen-style stain remover—just a wee bit bigger than the Tide pen at 5.5" with 20 millimeters in each—my mom immediately had brand recognition. “This one is famous—I think a lot of people use OxiClean for regular laundry,” she said. But moments later, she flipped sides. “Ai yo! This one doesn’t remove anything at all,” she said. “Oxi is no good.” How often do you stain your clothes? If it’s often it’s most likely while you’re outside the home, and a portable stain remover pen would be best. If your stains are further and fewer between, a spray for home use will suffice. As my mom watched me purposefully create stains, she looked doubtfully at the lineup of stain removers. Her skepticism only gave the lineup of products an even bigger challenge as we started going down the line to test them out. Things to remember Another factor to keep in mind is the type of fabric you tend to wear. Some fabrics, like wool and cashmere, are harder to clean and need more care when removing stains. Others, like cotton, can tolerate sprays and intense wash cycles before fraying or shrinking.And a bonus tip from mom: “Wash out stains as soon as you see them. Go the bathroom right away and scrub it out before it settles into the fabrics,” she says. “Then when you get home, wash it properly.” The type of stain and how it sits on the particular fabric means that no two solutions may be the same every time, so treat each incident individually. Note: for the OxiClean stain removing powder we gave it its own t-shirt since it’s designed to be used as a pre-soak and added to a regular laundry cycle. As we’ve mentioned above, we separated stain removers into two categories during this test: portable and at-home. We measured both based on the same criteria, taking into account that they’re not made with the exact same objectives in mind. From the dark soy sauce to the olive oils, it definitely “lightens” the stains, as my mom put it. Though her instinct was to add on, “It seems to only temporarily clean it, and when you get home you need to still work on it.” In the end, we did determine it was a solid runner-up, or as Mom put it frankly, “pretty good.”