Last summer I bought some lovely, big, green, chunky vintage buttons at a quite amazing button shop called Knopf-Paul, in Kreuzberg, Berlin. (It’s got a huge collection ofbuttons crammed into a shop, with extra bargain bins outside on the pavement – well worth a visit if you’re a button fan in Berlin. The nearest U-Bahn is Gneisenau Straße.)
The trouble was, the buttons were sold stuck to a piece of sellotape to hold them together, and when I got home and peeled them off in preparation for turning them into jewellery, I found the sellotape left a sticky residue behind. I tried using everything I could think of to clean it off: abrasive cream cleaners, alcohol, applying heat (as recommended by several websites), nail-varnish remover. But nothing would touch it. But today I tried a different approach – oil. I used sweet almond oil, because that’s what I had, but I imagine any other kind of vegetable-based oil would work (e.g. olive oil). And it worked! The oil dissolved the residue and it was easy to wipe away.
Here’s how I did it:
Cleaning Sellotape Residue from Plastic Using Oil
1. With a soft cloth, rub oil onto the sticky area. Clean off as much as you can.
2. Leave a layer of oil sitting on the affected area for a few minutes, to dissolve any leftover bits. Go and make a cup of tea or something, while it does its thing.
3. With a clean bit of cloth, rub off remaining oil and sticky residue. It should be gone, but if there is any left, repeat steps 1 – 3 until it’s all gone.
4. Wash off the remaining film of oil using regular dish detergent and water.
5. Leave to dry on a clean, dry cloth.
Here are two buttons, before and after:

The back of the button on the left is covered in sellotape residue, despite having been attacked with all kinds of alcohol, cleaning products and acetone. The button on the right has been rubbed with oil, and is residue-free – it just has a few marks and scratches that you might expect from a used, vintage button.