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Can you defeat curry stains by hanging your clothes in the sunshine?【Experiment】

Casey Baseel Sep 2, 2024
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Summer sun versus curcumin – FIGHT!

There are three things that you can be certain will happen in Japan. In spring, the sakura will bloom. In fall, the leaves will turn red. And, eventually, you’re going to spill curry on your clothes.

It’s just inevitable, really. Between the easy access to and delicious flavor of Japanese curry, it’s something everyone ends up eating a lot of, and with enough gusto that sooner or later some roux is going to find its way onto your wardrobe. Even worse, curry’s deep color and non-solid texture mean that it’s not the sort of thing you can just quickly and easily brush off to avoid staining. The really big problem is the curcumin, a yellow pigment that’s found in turmeric, one of the key ingredients in curry. Curcumin is highly resistant to breaking down in water, so once it gets onto your clothes, it’s not likely to come out so easily in the wash.

So our Japanese-language reporter Anji Tabata was very interested when she heard that even though curcumin is resistant to water, it’s weak to ultraviolet light, meaning that you can fight curry stains with sunlight. This might sound too good to be true, but the information came from none other than S&B Foods, one of Japan’s biggest curry roux makers, who mention the tip on their official website.

Though it probably wouldn’t have been that long until our next unintended curry spill, Anji decided to kickstart our test of this technique by purposely staining three pieces of fabric with some S&B curry roux. In order to approximate clothing someone might be wearing, the first piece was a 93-perceent-cotton, 7-percent-polyurethane blend, the second piece 100-percent cotton, and the third 100-percent linen, shown left-to-right in the photo below.

She plopped a drop of curry roux onto each of them and let them sit for an hour for the stain to set. Next, she quickly hand-washed each of them with laundry detergent, after which they looked like this.

Then, it was time for the battle between sunshine and curcumin to commence. Anji decided to hang the three cloths on her balcony for eight hours, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., straddling morning and afternoon since her balcony has lots of direct sunlight in the morning, but less in the afternoon, which she figured would balance out to a moderate ultraviolet light total.

At 4 o’clock, she took them back in to check the results, and sure enough, the sunlight had done a pretty effective job erasing the curry stains!

No, they weren’t completely gone, but the progress was remarkable, considering she’d used no extra water or cleaning agents since putting them outside. Anji was particularly happy to see how much better cloth #1 looked, since the blended material is the same material as a lot of her shirts. Even if there’s still some discoloration, the vastly smaller and fainter staining means that there’s much less fabric that’s going to need bleach or other chemical stain removers applied to it, both of which themselves can actually damage the color of clothing if overused.

So in the end, Anji is happy to report that while the sun won’t do all of your curry stain removal work for you, it is a powerful ally, and one whose help you should probably enlist first so that you can then use more pinpoint accuracy for the potentially harsher methods. It’s good to know that an errant drop of curry doesn’t mean we need to throw out an item of clothing, especially since avoiding unnecessary clothes replacements leaves us more room in our budget at a time when the cost to cook curry rice is rising.

Reference: S&B Foods
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