Cleaning certain stains on surfaces can be difficult – and one of which many struggle with is tea and coffee cup stains.
If your favourite cup has turned into a canvas of stubborn brown rings, it’s the pesky tannins from tea and coffee to blame.
These natural plant compounds may be behind the rich flavours of our beloved hot drinks, but they’re notorious for leaving hard-to-shift marks.
Thankfully, cleaning lover Lese Mmolorsi has come to the rescue with a nifty trick to tackle those tenacious tannin stains in a video on her Instagram page @homewithlese.
She promises this is the “easiest” way to rid those stains, using some everyday household items – white vinegar and baking soda.
Lese captioned the clip saying: “This is one of the easiest cleaning hacks I have been using to get rid of tea/coffee stains in cups.
“I don’t need to take the time soaking and scrubbing them for so long.”
White vinegar turns out to be the hero of this cleaning tip, its acetic acid content mercilessly breaking down the chemical bonds the tannins so love to form on your cop’s surface.
A dash of vinegar combined with baking soda and some boiling water can make light work of even the most neglected mug stains.
For this tip, she advised starting off by adding half a tablespoon of baking soda to the stained cup before adding in double the amount of vinegar.
Then fill the rest of the cup up with hot water and leave it to sit for a few minutes – three minutes is more than enough time.
Once the time is up just empty the cup and give it a rinse and all the stains will have disappeared.
Showing the camera her before and after results, the inside was completely stain-free and looked like new
It left fans in the comments section dubbing this hack as “amazing”. @lous_home_ wrote: “Fab hack! Feel like I’m forever scrubbing tea stains out of mugs.”
@clean_with_gemma2 said: “Wow great results.” @following_edyta commented: “This was fabulous! I will need to try.”