Okay, I was pretty adamant that you should own at least one pair of white canvas shoes. Be they Chuck Taylors, Converse One Stars from Target, or Vans Authentics, you should have at least one pair.
But white shoes are hard to keep clean. They will eventually get dirty.
Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have worn them to work.
Thankfully, there is a way to get some dirt off them. Warning: it does take time and effort. If you’re still interested, continue reading. If you aren’t interested in keeping them white anymore, you can go the route I did and eventually dye them a different color. But that is an entirely separate article.
What you will need:
-white, uncolored toothpaste
-a couple of toothbrushes
-baby powder
-a source of water both warm and cold
-a bowl
Everything you’ll need.
1. Remove those laces
No need to get the laces wet, they usually don’t get that dirty. Completely remove them from your shoes and set them outside of the area you will be working in.
Imagine you’re pulling the last hairs off a bald man’s head.
2. Bust out the toothpaste and your first brush
The toothpaste is for cleaning the rubber sole of each shoe. Do not use the toothpaste on the canvas. Wet the toothbrush slightly and put a dab of toothpaste on. Gently massage the toothpaste onto the rubber sole of the shoe. You’ll slowly see the dirt and junk coming off. Do this for all of the rubber on the shoes and instead of rinsing the toothpaste off, use a towel or paper towel to remove the excess. You’ll rinse the shoes later, so any little bit left over will be come off later.
You’re supposedly able to use this stuff on your teeth too.
3. Take one bowl and add baby powder and water.
Simple enough. You want an even mix of powder and water – it should be somewhere between completely watery and mucky (specific, I know). The point is that you’ll be able to get some on another toothbrush without coating tons of layers of this mixture on the shoes. If you aren’t sure of the consistency, add much more water than baby powder. Make sure you’re able to put the bristles of the toothbrush into the mixture.
No jokes here about what this looks like.
4. Coat all of the canvas on both shoes with the mixture.
This means all of the cloth on the shoes. Coat the entirety of both shoes, not just the dirty areas. You might spend a little more time rubbing the mixture onto the dirty spots though.
5. Dry your shoes.
This can be done in several ways. You can sit and dry them with a hair dryer, which is what I did, or simply sit them on a warm air vent. However you let them dry though, you want to make sure they are nice and dry before step six.
Is it odd to use the dryer for shoes more often than your hair?
6. Brush off the now dry baby powder
This is where you use another dry toothbrush; it can be the same one as before as long as you cleaned it and let it dry. Carefully brush off the baby powder that is on the shoes. If you used less baby powder in your mixture earlier, it will come off easily but won’t do as good of a job cleaning spots. If you used too much baby powder in your mixture though, you’ll have a pretty hard time getting all of that baby powder off the shoes.
This takes a while.
That is it! Enjoy your clean shoes. If that didn’t get the spots out, don’t do what I did and try to bleach them out. You’ll just end up with discolored shoes. Try this method several more times or throw them into the washer with a little detergent. My shoes ended up discolored after testing a little bleach on them, so I ended up dying my shoes a royal blue. That, however, will be an article that will have to wait until next week.
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