As you enter the world of carpet cleaning, you are often faced with an overwhelming range of commercial products, each boasting its unique cleaning formula. However, an unexpected, highly efficient, and cost-effective solution might be quietly sitting within your bathroom cabinet right now—shaving foam. Beyond its well-known role in grooming, shaving foam has surprising versatility.

It also works as a gentle yet effective and budget-friendly carpet cleaner, which might initially strike you as unusual, but it's ideal for keeping your carpets fresh and well-maintained. Taking to TikTok, Queen of Clean Lynsey Crombie demonstrated how to use shaving foam on two of her carpet stains. She stressed that it’s important to use shaving foam and not shaving gel for this hack.

Lynsey started by spraying the stains with a generous amount of shaving foam before using a microfibre cloth to scrub the area.

After a few minutes, she wiped away the shaving foam, and the stains were completely gone.

The influencer echoed the method on her cleaning blog too: “Spray a bit of shaving cream on carpet stains, scrub in using a soft bristle brush, allow them to dry and then blot clean using a white cloth.”

Taking to the comments section on the video, fans had some questions about this hack, like would it work on old stains, and how long should you leave the shaving foam on the stains.

The influencer noted that shaving foam is a “game-changer” on old stains and recommended leaving it to sit for 20 minutes before wiping the area down.

So, what makes shaving foam effective? Traditional shaving foams are formulated with several key ingredients that contribute to their effectiveness as carpet cleaners. Surfactants are the primary active ingredients.

These lower the surface tension of a liquid, making it easier to spread and allowing it to penetrate the carpet fibres.

Surfactants also help to lift and dissolve dirt and stains from the carpet, allowing the water in the cream to mix with water-soluble stains or dirt.

Many types of shaving foams also include glycerin, which helps lock in moisture. When it comes to carpet cleaning, glycerin works as a great stain remover and might prevent your carpet from drying out during the cleaning process, since it has good moisturising properties.