Cleaning ThingsHome & Garden

How To Clean A Vinyl Shower Curtain Liner

When it comes to laundry, there are a few “unknowns” in my world, like…

  • how to keep whites white
  • how to rid men’s softball pants of reddish-brown dirt
  • and the right way to use Bleach (It’s safe with some colors? What about whites that have colored collars & trim? Then again, sometimes bleach turns whites grey, right?)

Bleach and laundry issues continue to confuse me.

Well, this weekend, I finally found one great resource for Bleach:

Use it to remove the caked on mildew and grime that is growing on the back of a vinyl shower curtain liner!

How to use bleach to clean your shower curtain

Lavender colored shower curtain cleaned with bleach.

I’ve heard that you should use vinegar to wash the shower curtain liner in your washing machine.

That has always worked so-so for me.

But this weekend, we were out of vinegar, so I used Bleach instead.

I was afraid of two things:

  1. That the bleach would hurt the vinyl, and maybe even eat a hole right through it; and
  2. That the bleach would stain the vinyl, leaving us with a white-spotty shower curtain liner (that was a deep lavender to start with).

Close up of shower curtain liner.Neither actually occurred, and I couldn’t be happier with the results!

This shower curtain liner looks like NEW.

And to think, prior to this washing, Jim actually wanted me to just toss it in the garbage…

FYI: I used about a 1/2 cup of bleach and enough liquid detergent for a full load of wash then ran it through the complete cycle in the washing machine.


I recently read that this works well too:
Put your shower curtain in the washing machine with detergent, a 1/2-cup of salt, and a fluffy towel. Supposedly, the salt clinks to the curtain and repels mold and mildew. The towel balances out the laundry load.