Shout Advanced Gel

With four kids under eight, I do a ton of laundry each week, and it’s a rather time consuming process to stay on top of everything. I don’t get much chance to take my time sorting and moving laundry through before someone poops or needs help getting a drink or a boo-boo kissed or homework checked or a ride to ballet or help cleaning up eleventy million legos or…

Sorry, got carried away a bit there. The point is that stains frequently go all the way through the laundry before I even notice that they’re there. So we are a perfect test family for Shout Advanced Gel, which advertises that it is specially formulated to handle stubborn, set-in stains. I bought a bottle at Target a few weeks ago to see how it performed compared to the regular Shout Gel and OxiClean, my current favorite stain removers.

I already knew when I bought it what I would be testing it on: three t-shirts of mine with stubborn spit-up stains, a t-shirt of my daughters with a chocolate ice cream stain she got the second time she wore the shirt, a few spit rags that have stains from my baby’s medicine that is a suspension in chocolate syrup, and the mattress cover from my son’s bed that has old old bloodstains from when he dropped a vise on his foot. I treated all items according to the directions on the package, let them sit for an hour, and then washed them.

The spit-up stains on my t-shirts came out perfectly clean, where it hadn’t with the regular Shout Gel or OxyClean. My daughter’s t-shirt, the spit rags, and the mattress cover were lightened dramatically, but the stains were still there. With enough effort with regular Shout Gel and the OxyClean, I can achieve lightened stains, too. I was disappointed.

Shout Advanced Gel didn’t perform well enough to justify buying yet another stain remover beyond what I already use.