Get the stain out before it sets

Cold water. From the back of the fabric. Within about ninety seconds. That single sequence saves more shirts than every product on the supermarket shelf put together, and it costs nothing.

Most stains aren't ruined by the spill. They're ruined by the twenty minutes you spent finishing your dinner, then by the hot tap, then by the tumble dryer. A fresh splash of bolognese on a white cotton shirt is a five-minute job. The same splash, dried and then heated, is a shirt you now wear to paint the fence.

So the skill is mostly about order. Do these things in this order and you'll win far more often than you lose.

Get it off before you get it out

Lift the solid material away first. A spoon, a butter knife, the edge of a credit card. Scrape, don't press. Pressing pushes the stain deeper into the weave and spreads it sideways, which turns a coin-sized mark into a palm-sized one.

For grease and oil, do the opposite of wet. Cover it with something dry and absorbent and leave it alone. Cornflour, talc, or plain white flour will pull a good amount of the oil out of the fibres in ten to fifteen minutes. Brush it off outside or over a bin. Only then introduce liquid.

For anything solid and sticky, cold helps. Chewing gum and candle wax both come off far more easily when hard. Ice cube in a sandwich bag, hold it against the gum for a couple of minutes, then pick the brittle lump off with your fingernail.

Cold, until you know better

Warm water sets protein. Blood, egg, milk, gravy, sweat, anything that came out of an animal. Hot water cooks it into the fabric the way it cooks in a pan, and once cooked it isn't coming back out. This is the single most common mistake, and it's the one people make while trying to be helpful.

Cold water does almost nothing bad to almost anything. Start there, always. If you later decide a stain wants heat, you can add it. You can't take it away.

Run the cold tap through the back of the fabric, not the front. Flush the stain out the way it came in, rather than pushing it further through. Hold the garment inside out under the tap for thirty seconds and watch how much of a coffee spill simply leaves.

Blot, and blot properly

Rubbing is the other great mistake. It grinds pigment into individual fibres, breaks the surface of wool and velvet, and leaves a permanently fuzzy patch where the stain used to be. On a knit, rubbing can pull a whole pill of fibre loose.

Put a clean white cloth or folded kitchen paper underneath the stain. Dab from the outside of the mark inwards, with a fresh bit of cloth each time, and let the pad underneath take the colour. When the pad stops taking colour, move to the next step. Use white cloth. A patterned tea towel will happily donate its own dye to a wet shirt.

The safety part, and it's short

Two things here can genuinely hurt you.

Never mix chlorine bleach with ammonia, and never mix it with vinegar. Both combinations release toxic gas in a small bathroom in seconds. If you've used one product and it hasn't worked, rinse the garment thoroughly with water before you try another. Don't layer chemicals on wet fabric and hope.

Solvent-based removers, including dry-cleaning fluid and lighter fluid, need an open window and no flame. Don't tumble dry anything that still smells of solvent. A rag soaked in oil or solvent in a warm dryer drum is a real fire, not a theoretical one.

Wear gloves for anything stronger than washing-up liquid. And test every product on a hidden seam first, the inside of a hem or the inside of a cuff, because hydrogen peroxide and oxygen bleach will lift colour out of dyed cotton as happily as they lift out the stain.

Match the treatment to the stain

There are really only five families, and each responds to a different thing.

• Protein. Blood, egg, milk, sweat, mud with organic matter in it. Cold water, then a biological detergent. The enzymes in "bio" powder are there specifically for this. Soak in cold water with a spoonful of bio detergent for half an hour. For blood on white cotton, 3% hydrogen peroxide from the chemist on the spot will fizz it out quickly. Test first.
• Tannin. Red wine, tea, coffee, fruit juice, beer. Flush with cold water hard and fast. Then washing-up liquid and white vinegar, roughly one part vinegar to two parts water. Don't reach for soap first on tannin. Bar soap can fix tea and coffee in place.
• Oil and grease. Butter, salad dressing, engine oil, lip balm. Absorb dry, then washing-up liquid worked in neat with a fingertip or an old toothbrush. Washing-up liquid is built to cut grease and it's the most underrated stain product in the house. Leave it on for ten minutes, then wash as warm as the care label allows. Grease is the one family that wants heat.
• Dye. Grass, ink, mustard, turmeric, red food colouring. Isopropyl alcohol or plain surgical spirit on a cotton pad for ink. Dab, don't flood. For grass, a little washing-up liquid and white vinegar, then bio detergent. Dye stains are the ones that most often win.
• Combination. Chocolate, gravy, foundation makeup, ice cream. Treat the grease first with washing-up liquid, then the protein or pigment with bio detergent. In that order, or the oil will keep water away from the rest.

When you're nowhere near a sink

At a wedding or in a restaurant, you've got cold water and napkins. That's enough for the first ninety seconds. Wet a napkin, blot from underneath with a dry one, and stop. Soda water works, but it works because it's cold and wet, not because of the bubbles. Don't let anyone talk you into salt on red wine on a good shirt. It absorbs a bit, and it also abrades the fibres while you grind it in with a thumb.

Don't use the hand soap in the bathroom on a tannin stain. Don't use the warm hand dryer on any of it.

The step everyone skips

Before the garment goes anywhere near a dryer or a warm radiator, check the stain in daylight. Wet fabric hides a lot. A shadow you can't see under a kitchen light is obvious at the window.

If there's any trace left, treat it again and wash again. A second attempt on a still-damp stain is easy. A second attempt after forty minutes at high heat is usually pointless, because heat does to most stains what it does to protein. It bonds them.

What you're not going to save

Turmeric on white cotton. Old ballpoint on silk. Anything already washed, dried and put away three weeks ago. Iron mould, rust and mystery spots on vintage linen. Red wine on suede.

For silk, wool, leather, suede and anything structured like a suit jacket, the honest answer is to stop after the cold blot and take it to a cleaner within a day or two. Tell them what the stain is. A cleaner who knows it was salad dressing has a much better chance than one guessing at a brown mark. Home treatment on a tailored jacket can shrink the interfacing and ruin the shape, and then you've lost the whole garment rather than one panel of it.

Keep the failures. A shirt with a ghost of a mark on the second button is still a perfectly good shirt for a Saturday in the garden, and you'll stop noticing it by spring.