One of the simple joys in life is keeping your surroundings neat and tidy. Washing clothes, doing the dishes, mopping the floor, and the like. So when I took a day off to unwind and relax, I set forth on a mission that I’ve been avoiding over the past few months — cleaning the mirrors.
I assume everyone knows the benefits of cleaning the mirror, so I’m not going to touch upon that. Waking up to see the beautiful you (yes, you’re beautiful 🔫) in a pristine mirror will set you up for a pleasant rest of the day. And yes, you can see all the minute flaws of your skin (still beautiful tho 🔫) and the texture of your tongue through a spotless mirror.
Considering all these, I decided to clean the mirror. Great! So, how do I do it? As any sane person, I googled it. The internet presented me with five options:
White vinegar
Cleaning liquid
Toothpaste
Lemon juice
Rubbing alcohol
At the time of writing this rant, I’ve tried four of the five aforesaid methods. Let’s now go through each of these methods and my experience with them:
White vinegar
White vinegar was praised to be the magic potion to clean them all. Buying into the hype, I headed to my friendly neighborhood hypermarket and bought a bottle. Time to make the mirror spotless, I thought. Wrong!
The suggestion on the internet was to mix white vinegar with water and spray it on the mirror. And that’s what I did. Waited a few minutes for vinegar to do its magic before wiping and……nothing. The mirror looks just the same. Dejected, I tried bruteforcing the cleaning process by pouring white vinegar directly to the mirror. Needless to say, that didn’t work either. Sigh!
Cleaning liquid
Another popular solution was to use a dedicated cleaning liquid. Hmm, time to bring in the specialists. I opened Swiggy Instamart and looked for a glass cleaner product. I found one too — Colin Glass & Multisurface Cleaner (yes, we’ve entered the name and shame territory here).
With much excitement, I unpacked the cleaning liquid while gobbling the oranges I bought to hit the free delivery threshold. Time to put this to the test, yaaay! To my surprise, the cleaner bottle came with two modes — spray mode and stream mode.
I elegantly sprayed the cleaning liquid across the mirror with full confidence and left it undisturbed for a while. After wiping it off, I could still see the stains. This is where desperation kicked in as I switched to stream mode and poured the liquid all over the mirror. Still nothing :(
If there’s one takeaway from this section, it is DON’T BUY COLIN GLASS AND MULTISURFACE CLEANER FOR CLEANING MIRRORS. You’ve been warned.
Toothpaste
Apparently, toothpaste has abrasive properties and it can be used as a “hack” to clean mirrors. Well, I tried that out too. I took a generous amount of Himalaya Sparkling White toothpaste (it tastes great btw) and applied it on a quarter of the mirror (Limited beta testing, you know). I waited and wiped it off. And yes, that didn’t work either.
Lemon juice
After a bit of research, I got to know that my mirror has what’s called a “limescale”. As irony would have it, lime juice is said to be an ingenious solution to get rid of limescale. I took the about-to-rot lemon I had purchased weeks back to drink a nice glass of lemon juice from the fridge and cut it into halves. I took a half, squeezed it, applied the liquid on the mirror, and waited. Yeah, that didn’t work too. :3
Rubbing alcohol
This is my final hope at this point. As I’m writing this, I’m awaiting a bottle of rubbing alcohol to arrive tomorrow through Amazon and I’m too tired to personally check if my neighborhood hypermarket has it in stock.
Speaking of rubbing alcohol, why are they so expensive?!?! It costs 172 rupees for 250ml of rubbing alcohol. That’s 688 rupees for a liter. One could get the actual alcohol cheaper than this. I should’ve probably taken that path and “accidentally” broken the mirror to self-justify purchasing a new one.
Anyway, I’ll update this post as and when the rubbing alcohol arrives and I get a moment to try it out. If this post doesn’t get an update, you can safely assume that the rubbing alcohol method didn’t work either.
Sidenote: If anyone wants to gift me something for my birthday, a nice aesthetic bathroom mirror would be a great idea, just saying. 🏃♂️
Speaking of birthday, I can’t shake this feeling that I’m getting old (duh). From looking forward to the evening for watching Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z as a kid to eyeing at aesthetic IKEA furniture as an adult (how are they so cute! 🥹), a lot has happened in between. We’ll see how things go, I guess.
Treat time: Do you mind seeing brand logos on roads if they fixed the potholes? As bizarre as it sounds, this Reddit post says that allegedly happened in Johannesburg. Honestly, I don’t see a problem. We’re constantly bombarded with ads and spam everywhere anyway, might as well have it on a potless road, especially in Bangalore. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Until next time! Hearts if you liked it, subs if you loved it!
Hygienically yours,
Subin
Try using newspaper. Worked well for me :P