[care_a_boo]

My daughter has a doll with plastic head, arms and legs that she has recently tattooed with pen. I have tried: baking soda, vinegar, detergent, toothpaste, whitening toothpaste, hairspray, nail polish remover, rubbing alcohol, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, and Goof Off. As you can see, my standards for how natural the cleaning product must be has dropped to about nil, as one trial after another fails. (I think Goof Off is turpentine and liquid evil.) This doll is very special to my daughter and I would love to be able to clean it for her. She's very sad about the markings on it and that's good, in as far as learning consequences go, but in the end, I'd like to be able to fix it. If it can be done in a natural way, I'd love that. If it can be done, but not naturally, I'll do it anyway, so long as I can remove the potenitally harmful cleanser before giving it back to my daughter.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

 

[care_a_boo]

Thank you all for the suggestions. I tried a few of them and Oxy 10 seems to be working. Yesterday I put a nice thick coat of it on all the stains (except the soles of the feet as a kind of control, so that I could tell whether the spots were realle fading or if it was my imagination) and let it dry. Because my daughter wanted her baby to sleep with, I wiped it off around 9 pm (the Oxy had been on maybe 8 hours) and it was obvious that it was working. The stains were quite faded. It will take several treatments to make this doll look reasonably recovered, and she'll probably always have a few blue "scars" but I had to share the success.

As far as it being a natural treatment, um, well, I wouldn't want to apply Oxy to my DDs's skin (although I put it on my own, back in the day, and it took me ages to recognize that such things were too harsh for me), but once it's dry enough to stay put, I feel OK letting her touch the doll even while she's wearing her body masque.

And once it's wiped off, I don't think there's any reason to worry about the contact.

But it beats liquid bleach and Goof Off (which puts off terrible fumes) by miles--both in terms of my comfort levels with contact and efficacy.

Thank you all for the great advice.

 

[care_a_boo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by amcal Oops, I missed that you tried hairspray already - sorry!

No problem. Ordinarily, hairspray is supposed to be excellent for ink, but it just wasn't working on the soft vinyl. Or maybe it just needed to be done immediately. Well, now I actually have hairspray in the house, just in case. But I plan on keeping all pens FAR FAR AWAY from my daughter for a few years yet. (Except for supervised drawing sessions...I would never dream of stiffling a creative genius like Olivia.

My future tattoo artist.)