These Popular TikTok Cleanup Hacks Don’t Actually Work

The idea of ​​finding a hack that will make your life easier or cheaper is especially tempting when it comes to cleaning the house —and TikTok is full of such tips. But many of the cleaning “hacks” you’ll find out there have superficial results, basic misinformation or disinformation, and the sad state of STEM education in this country. For example, here are some popular cleaning hacks that you may see on social media that don’t actually work.

Mop with boiling water

If you use CleanTok long enough, sooner or later someone will tell you to use boiling water to clean your floors. On the surface, this makes sense: we boil water to make it safe to drink and disinfect things, so why wouldn’t it work on your floors?

Well, mainly because your floor is not designed to withstand the heat of boiling water . If you do this, sealed hardwood floors will swell and sag, and vinyl and even some laminate floors will come off as the adhesive holding them in place fails. The worst part is that the damage may not show up right away, so you can spend a long time blissfully ruining your floors before you get to the “figuring out” stage of hack cleaning.

Using aspirin to whiten clothes

Apparently some people still live in terrible fear of being judged by the dullness of their white color, and spend a lot of mental and physical effort trying to lighten it. When looking for simple tricks to make your white laundry dazzlingly bright, you’ll come across videos like this one that suggest crushing up a few aspirin tablets and throwing them in the wash to significantly lighten your white laundry.

Besides the fact that this is one of those tricks that actually makes your life harder (because now you’re crushing tablets by the dozen instead of pouring some bleach into the washing machine), it just doesn’t work. Or better yet, it doesn’t work well . Aspirin breaks down into salicylic acid when exposed to water, and salicylic acid has relatively little detergent properties but almost no bleaching properties . Go home, Internet, you’re drunk.

Cleaning the toilet with Magic Eraser

Cleaning the toilet is a task that no one wants to do. So it’s easy to understand that when some guru tells you that you can keep your toilet perfectly clean by simply dropping a Magic Eraser into the tank to wet it, you listen. You’ll never have to gag while cleaning this bowl again!

Yes, it doesn’t work . In fact , it literally does nothing because Magic Erasers do not contain any detergents or cleaners at all (unless specifically stated otherwise). They clean using what is called “mechanical action,” that is, cleaning.

Cleaning with cola

Yes, cola is quite acidic, so it has some effect on dirt and stains . However, they are also filled with sugar and leave behind a sticky residue, they leave any glass or shiny surfaces smudged and smudged, and they have zero germ-killing effectiveness . It’s not entirely useless, but why it’s better than just buying cleaning products designed to clean, disinfect, and disappear without a trace remains a mystery.

Put lemons in the washing machine and dishwasher

Like cola, many TikTok and other social media users praise lemon as a cleanser due to its acidity (and the delicious aroma we’ve been conditioned to associate with cleanliness). And there’s some validity to this too, because citric acid is a good solvent when it comes to dirt, so in theory, throwing a lemon wedge in the dishwasher or a little lemon juice in the laundry would work. But in practice this doesn’t seem to work all that well .

The problem is really one of volume: you need about 1/2 cup of lemon juice to have any effect, and a lemon only contains one tablespoon of juice . To get that much juice, you’ll need about eight lemons, and now you’re squeezing the juice out of the lemons instead of just using detergent like you normally would.

Paper towels for removing stains from Tupperware.

No matter how hard we try to avoid it, our plastic food storage containers eventually develop dried orange stains that make them look unsanitary, even when they’re clean. The Internet will tell you that your desire to bury them in your backyard and buy new ones to rid your house of evil is misplaced: just add dishwashing liquid, water and a paper towel, shake vigorously, and those stains will disappear. left .

But as The Spruce points out, this will probably only work on fresh stains from food you just cooked—old, set stains will laugh at your efforts. So while it’s not a complete waste of your time, it’s not a magic hack that will save your Tupperware.