Me vs. permanant marker

I normally don't care about the permanent marker line that the J. Crew factory in Lynchburg puts over labels at their special sales, but when I got these shoes from their bridal sale in Richmond a few months ago, I was a little sad that they were marked.  After all, I'm a big fan of wedding shoe photographs and want my shoes to be perfect.

 

I decided to see if I could lighten the marks or remove them completely.   My first thought was to use a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser on them.  That thing works wonders.  A quick scrub definitely lightened to permanent ink, but it seemed to leave a little discoloration on one of the shoes.  I didn't want to do more damage, so I took to the web to see what other tactics could be used to get rid of the marks.

 

Quite a few websites recommended blotting the marks with rubbing alcohol and hairspray.  I don't keep rubbing alcohol in the house (I don't even know what to use it for) and I don't use hairspray.  However, after rummaging around in my bathroom closet, I found a bottle of Suave hairspray.  I imagine that the one time I used to the stuff, I grabbed whatever was cheapest at the store.  Looking at the label, I found that the first ingredient in hairspray is alcohol, so I decided it would suffice.

The hairspray worked pretty well!  I don't know why, but the marks were fading.

I feared that the hairspray was affecting the gold lining of the shoes, so I looked though my toiletries for something that had alcohol in it, but not as much as the hairspray.  My hope was that it would be less harsh.  I found a bottle of Tend Skin.  The ingredient list started with water and was followed by alcohol, so I gave that a try...

I started alternating between the two and managed to fade the marks quite a bit.  Per the sites I found, had I tried this when I first bought the shoes, I might have had more success.