How to Remove Silicone From Clothing

Use Mr. Freeze to help you remove silicone caulk from clothing.

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Silicone sealant or caulk, once applied, is meant to stay. This is one of the main reasons why figuring out how to remove silicone from clothing is such a challenge. Clothing, unlike most surfaces where silicone sealant is applied, is porous. Once silicone caulk soaks into clothing, it has the annoying tendency to stay there.

All, as they say, isn’t lost, however. There are a few tricks you can use to get out most, if not all, of any silicone caulk that may have seeped into your clothing.

Freeze Ray

Yep, just like Mr. Freeze with Batman, cold weather is the arch enemy of silicone caulk. Once you’ve discovered that you have silicone all over your favorite piece of clothing, the first thing to do is to remove it. Do this carefully, otherwise you might wind up spreading around the silicone sealant even more.

Fold the clothes so that the silicone sealant is on the outside. Open up the freezer and put the clothes into the deep freeze.

Wait about an hour for the silicone to harden. Remove the clothes from the freezer. Cut as much as you can off the clothes with a sharp utility knife.

Removing Silicone Residue from Your Clothing

Ok, so the bulk of the silicone is gone from your clothes, but there’s still that annoying residue. How best to get rid of this?

Here is where we make our way into uncharted territory. Unfortunately, no two pieces of clothing are the same. What might remove caulk residue from one piece of cloth might wind up eating another.

So all we can really tell you is to pick your poison of cleaner and test it out on a small part of your clothes to see if it is safe to use. If your shirt isn’t eaten away, apply your cleaner of choice to the silicone caulk residue on your clothes. Allow this to soak in for about half an hour or so, then scrub with a sponge.

Once you’ve removed as much of the residue with the cleaner as possible, throw the item of clothing into your washer. Don’t wash it with anything else – the caulk might just spread to the rest of your clothes.

After washing, pull the clothes out of the laundry. Don’t put them in the dryer. This may cause any caulk still in the cloth to spread out all over the dryer. That can get very messy.

Check the item and see how much of the caulk is still left. Repeat the freezing and cleaning process until your clothes are once again caulk free.