My Dye Removal Experience

So I finally have an experience with removing dye. This isn't exactly an experiment, and I have no immediate plans to replicate this any time soon, so your mileage may very.

Additional note: Grim is a recast. He among the last I own (only my dragons and him remain). Please don't share this where they aren't welcome.

Grim here was really looking rough. He was my first dye experiment (click here for how I did it then, and then here for an updated dyeing tutorial), and one of my early attempts at body blushing. I didn't have an airbrush then, and overall I'm still pretty proud of the work I did with only pastels.

He has two eyes here to show different sizes. 16mm green mako, and 18mm MoC blue glass.

So I wiped him down. I used a Magic Sponge with 91% rubbing alcohol on it, and I was surprised to see not only the face up and sealant come off but the dye as well!

Disclaimer: Technically you are not supposed to apply other chemicals to the Magic Sponges. It can create abrasions on your skin and crap like that. I do it anyway.

The dye came off fairly evenly, with some splotching here and there. I didn't have to scrub at all for the dye to come off. I imagine darker colors and deeper set dyes will require more elbow grease. I decided to go ahead and wipe down his entire body, so to speed up the process I used acetone* and wiped down his body. With little to no effort, he ended up like this, with parts completely white:

*Disclaimer: I don't use acetone on other people's dolls. Acetone is finicky. I use it to remove paint on vinyl toys and my own dolls and leave it on only for up to a minute at a time. I then wash the entire part in regular Dawn dish soap to ensure there is no acetone remaining. So far, so good. I wouldn't soak a doll in it, and definitely not for more than a couple minutes at most, but it is excellent at stripping off dye and caked-on face ups.

And here's his progress so far:

And just for reference here's a guide to restringing a Pipos Cheshire Cat.
I'm working on a video restringing tutorial and that'll be posted soon too.