How to Get Your Shoes Cleaner Whiter and Brighter

How to Get Your Shoes Cleaner Whiter and Brighter: Running shoes are all the fashion rage these days, and, interestingly enough, white soled running shoes are pretty darn fashionable. The issue is white soled running shoes get dirty really quick and can be a bit of a challenge to take care of. So, in order to get your running shoes in Jerry Seinfeld condition, I’m going to show you a few quick and easy cleaning tips on how you can bring your shoes back to looking beautiful. Everybody wants to know how to clean their running shoes, and I get this question a lot. I would love to give you a one size fits all answer, but unfortunately because not all shoes, shoe materials, and shoe manufacturers are created equal, there’s not one easy answer. But what I can do is give you a couple of good pointers or starting places so that you can get your shoes as clean as possible. I’m going to show you exactly how to make sure that these look amazing all the time. So these are relatively new shoes for me. They’re not that messed up. But if you look at these, they definitely have a little bit more wear in them.

So the way to get these absolutely clean is to make a solution of equal parts baking soda and laundry detergent. I’m using scent free and color free, but you can use whatever you feel good about using. Mix that together in a bowl and then apply that to the stained area using a cleaning toothbrush. Now you don’t need too much product here, just enough to make sure you can start agitating that dirt off. So rub it a few times with the toothbrush. Then you’re going to use a sponge, rinse it with a little bit of cold water and pat it to dry. You should see those stains come right off. Here’s a quick little cheat for you to keep your runners clean on the go if, for whatever reason, you don’t have access to the actual cleaning materials I just covered. Get yourself one of these. It’s a white eraser. You can pick it up at an art store or an office supply store. Don’t get a pink one or a custom shape or character. Just this one is exactly what you need. What you’ll do, and this will work on leather and this will work on rubber. Just find the area that’s affected, aka a little bit dirty, and literally start erasing that stain the same way you would erase a long division homework issue that you have been having. I know you’re going to start carrying one of these around in your purse or your pocket. I carry one around in my purse, and my life has definitely been improved ever since. There’s no sense in having beautifully clean shoes if you’re going to have really raunchy laces.

So what you can do is simply pre-treat the dirty areas of the laces, because God knows where these things have ended up. You can use a bit of laundry detergent, a bit of dish detergent, a little bit of stain pre-treater. Whatever you’ve got handy is fine. Then just find yourself a delicates bag. Again, this is why I talk about them all the time. You use them for absolutely everything. Throw your laces into the delicates bag. Wash them as you normally would, and your laces will be good to go. Now, while they’re washing, what you can do is clean the little area where the laces go, those little holes. You can use a cleaning toothbrush with a little bit of laundry detergent and a little bit of water. Give then a quick scrub and then sponge dry them and you’ll be good. If you notice that your shoes are crazy dirty because, big surprise, you’re one of the people that actually wears running shoes because you exercise, what you can do is let those shoes dry entirely. Then you’re going to get yourself a cleaning toothbrush or perhaps a brush that’s a little bit bigger, I just don’t have one handy, and you’re literally going to take your shoe and the brush and start dry brushing that dirt off. It’s a lot easier to deal with once it’s actually dry. So let that all fall to the ground. Once that’s done, you’ll have a little bit of dirt left, and you can make a solution of a teaspoon of laundry detergent to about a cup of water. Dip your cleaning toothbrush or a cleaning cloth or a sponge in that solution and then just lightly start to clean the dirty areas. The idea is you don’t want to get the shoe too, too wet. Again, some shoes really can’t sustain any water. And then, once that’s done, you’re going to take a clean sponge, you’re going to take some clean water, you’re going to rinse off any of those extra suds, and then you’re going to leave your shoe to dry. Now you’re not putting it under artificial heat. You’re literally just letting it air dry and do it’s thing. Now, interestingly, you can do the same exact thing for your sock liner. If you notice that it is a little bit on the pungent side, you can take that mixture of laundry detergent and water, just scrub a cleaning toothbrush in that mixture and then start cleaning the sole. Rinse it well. Lay that flat to dry and that should smell a lot better. And if you want to be really special, you can sprinkle a little bit of baking soda on that while it dries overnight. Now we’ll deal with the uncomfortable topic of foot odor, and there’s a really easy way to get rid of it.

If you liked this tip leave me a comment and let me know or if you have any cleaning questions, if you’re really interested in my cleaning tips on an ongoing basis subscribe to our blog and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin