untested, but the point is you can pass an object as the second parameter of the .bind() function. Doesn't work with the shortcuts as far as I know. Then, you can access those object in the event.data property of the event passed into the function.
$("#artigos_listagem li").mouseover(function(e){ var orgBg = $(this).css('background'); $(this).css({ background: "#ffffaa" }); }); $("#artigos_listagem li").bind('mouseout', { 'orgBg' : orgBg}, function(e){ $(this).css({ background: e.data.orgBg }); }); I'm also not quite sure what you are attempting... it looks like those li are getting a mouseover/mouseout function that sets the background to one color when rolling over and to another when rolling off. If that is the case: $("#artigos_listagem li").toggle(function() { $(this).css({'background':'#ffffaa'}); }, function() { $(this).css({'background':'#aaffff'}); }) If the colors aren't known beforehand, since you are setting it dynamically on li's with different background colors then you could save the current background color as a custom attribute using .attr() or as data on the object using .data() http://docs.jquery.com/Internals/jQuery.data