Foil in the Dishwasher Doesn’t Add Shine to Your Cutlery.
According to TikTok, putting a wad of foil in the dishwasher is a great way to sparkle your cutlery. As you can imagine, I had my doubts. However, I’m a woman of the people, and if people want shiny silver, I’m going to find out if foil in the dishwasher is the easiest way to do it. I have followed the lead of many TikToks and am here to present my findings.
Foil in the dishwasher: method
According to hackers and Cleantokkers, you need to roll up a piece of foil and insert it into the cutlery holder of your dishwasher. This is easier than most hacks as it only requires one ingredient and a little tweaking which is very easy to do so it already works in this trick’s favor.
However, when I opened the dishwasher, I had a few questions. Firstly, a regular cutlery holder has many compartments. Does foil being in only one of them affect any cutlery in the other slots? My compartments were also smaller than average. Will this affect the effectiveness of the method?
I watched more videos and learned that it’s not a physical glow happening, but rather a chemical one, so a ball of foil in one compartment will only have no effect on the silverware it shares that space with; according to trend proponents, this will affect all cutlery around.
With that in mind, I put three cutlery in one compartment and a pair of scissors in the other, and then tucked the foil ball into the compartment using a fork, spoon, and knife. I ran the dishwasher normally.
Foil in the dishwasher: results
I won’t beat around the bush: it didn’t actually work. When I took out the cutlery, it was clean, but I attribute that to the way it was washed. If you want to polish your silverware, you should use a different technique, such as rubbing it with toothpaste. (This makes sense since it’s a bit abrasive!)
This technique is probably based on an older and more complex method : you wrap tarnished silver in foil and put it in very hot water that also contains baking soda to create a reaction that makes it shine. The differences between this approach and the dishwasher foil ball probably explain why the old method stood the test of time and the new one didn’t (at least for me). When you wrap and submerge tarnished silver, it remains in hot water for a long time and is constantly exposed to a mixture of water, baking soda and aluminum foil, which is not the case with a quick wash cycle.
The good news is that I can’t think of any downsides except that it doesn’t work. It didn’t make any unnecessary noise or have any negative effects on any of my dishes. Anyway, it’s harmless and I encourage curiosity and exploration, so go ahead if you want to prove me wrong on this matter.