Fels-Naptha

Last fall I got a salad dressing stain on an almost-new Ralph Lauren cotton sweater. It was a cream-colored crew neck with a couple of buttons on the shoulders, and I loved it.  It was perfect with my favorite khaki pants.

I was sure the stain would come out with Shout or whatever pre-laundry treatment I had, but alas, it didn’t.   In retrospect, I should have taken it to the cleaners from the get-go, but I didn’t and the sweater ended up in the Good Will Bag.  I still miss it.

More recently, in a casual conversation with a woman of my generation on our trip to India, I was regretting wearing my white slacks. They looked like they would never be white again.  “Just rub a little Fels Naptha on the spots before you wash them,” she suggested.

Now that’s a name I hadn’t heard in about sixty years.  “Does Fels Naptha still exist?” I asked.  “Of course”, she replied. “I wouldn’t use anything else for stains.”

She was right.  I found Fels Naptha in the laundry aisle at my grocery store.  The wrapper looked exactly as it had when I was a child.  More important, it is a miracle bar.  Stains on my white placemats.  Gone.  Ring around the collar on one of Peter’s shirts.  Gone.  My white pants.  White.

The label calls it a heavy-duty laundry bar soap.  I call it a miracle. 

Just too late for my cream-colored Ralph Lauren sweater.

 

Comments

[SusanG]

My mother used Fels Naptha on my father's shirt collars. She also scrubbed us down with it when we got into poison ivy, but I don't know how effective it was as I was never very sensitive to poison ivy.

[berick]

As a child in the 60s I was always scrubbed with Fels-Naptha after a hike in poison-oak country. Best soap for getting off all of the resin.