Dealing with Leather Stained White Socks

Have you ever noticed just how difficult it can be to deal with white socks that have leather stains? Often these stains will come from wearing leather boots, such as work boots and steel toed work boots. Frankly, there is very little that anyone can do that will have much of an impact on stains such as these. However, if the stains aren't particularly bad, there are some things that you can do that will remove them or at least hide them.

• Bleach. A tried and true method for dealing with leather stains as well as other kinds of problems. The trick is to learn when to use bleach and when not to. For any type of sock that is delicate or fragile, then you do not want to use this cleaner. Always start off with the least amount of bleach possible, and work your way up to something stronger, checking in between each wash cycle to make sure whether you have a stain or not.
• RIT. Using a dye, or dye removing product such as RIT can go a long way to dealing with leather stained socks. This process is actually a two-fold one in that if the first process doesn't work, you then go onto the next. Initially you want to start off using a dye removing agent, such as RIT Dye Remover, to get rid of any dye stain that may be on the socks. Just be sure that you are following the directions when you do this. If this does not remove the dye, you can always use a dark colored dye and change the appearance of the entire sock.
• Use different socks. The simplest solution for dealing with leather stained socks is to simply stop using white socks. Instead use darker colored work socks. While they may still have the dye stain on them, you will be hard pressed to actually see them. In fact, by using these types of socks instead of white tube socks you will see that there is less damage, less wear and tear than you would expect. The reason for this is simple—these types of socks are made and designed to put up with a lot of abuse.
• Deal with it. While this won't get rid of the stain, you can always simply deal with it. By this I mean, clean the socks as you normally would and simply live with the dye stain. The dye stain will not hurt anything, and can help you to mark what socks are your "work" socks, and which ones are not.