Ecolab USA Inc. patented a laundry cleaning composition that it says addresses the need for improved removal of lipstick on textiles and laundry, especially “long-wearing” lipsticks, which are typically very difficult to remove because of their waxy, oily and/or greasy consistency.

The I&I company cites the need for fabric substrates to be run through various pretreatment and/or washing processes depending on the particular method used in an effort to remove such difficult stains. These pretreatments or soaking have been employed to remove lip cosmetic soils or at last loosen the soils prior to a conventional laundry wash cycle. Further, Ecolab notes the pretreatments require submerging the substrate into a cleaning composition to sufficiently contact the soil, and there can be a need for additional processes such as rewashing the substrate, manually scrubbing the substrate, and/or adding additional time to the laundry wash cycle to remove such soils.

US Patent No. 11,702,617 B2 (Kerrie E. Walters, Jennifer Stokes, Carter M. Silvernail, Paige Owens, Ali Bichler, Sukhwan Soontravanich) was awarded to Ecolab for a composition consisting of an alkalinity source which is an alkali metal hydroxide; a branched polyamine; a surfactant, wherein the surfactant is a 2-ethylhexanol alkoxylate nonylphenol ethoxylate, ethoxylated amine, amine oxide, sophorolipid biosurfactant, an EO/PO block copolymer having terminal hydroxy groups and not having an alkyl group, or a combination thereof; water; and optionally, an additional functional ingredient (dye, optical brightener, enzyme, filler, oxidizer, water conditioning agent, or a combination thereof).

The lipstick noted in the patent application is a CoverGirl lipstick.

Fig. 1 (US Patent No. 11,702,617 B2) shows a graphical depiction of percent lipstick soil removed from cotton swatches with different chemistries.