Two weeks ago, we got new carpet and it’s a lovely light color. One week ago, we got a sweet puppy. Today that sweet puppy found a vial of blue food coloring that had fallen in the pantry and rolled out of our sight. He carried it to the carpet and, well, it looked like a smurf was murdered. We acted quickly and blotted up as much as we could. We also used stain sprays, then a carpet cleaning machine to clean it. We felt pretty good because we got it back to normal – you couldn’t see the blue at all! And then an hour later… a hint of blue appears. We spent the day blotting, spraying, cleaning and it is still drying blue even though it looks clean.
Why does that happen?
In: Chemistry
Although you probably got most of the stain off, some still remains, giving off the blueish color of the stain you see.
When we say “wet”, what we mean is there is some solvent (most commonly water) inbetween the fibers of the carpet.
This solvent, because of its refractive index (meaning light gets diverted to a different angle – much like how a straw looks like broken when half immersed in a glass of water), blends in color from the “clean” carpet while also diverting “some blue color away from your eyes”. So, more “clean” color and less “stain” color reaches your eyes, making the stain disappear. When the solvent is not anymore present (dry), light gets back to its “normal” path and you can spot the stain again.
Edit: punctuation
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