Polish Kitchen Appliances With Shaving Cream And Watch Fingerprints Disappear

Stainless steel appliances and surfaces are a great choice for your kitchen. Stainless steel is sleek, modern yet timeless, and matches everything. It's durable, heat-resistant, and rust-resistant, too. But while it might indeed be "stainless," it's certainly not fingerprint-less, or streak- or smudge-less, either. The handles, buttons, and surfaces of any stainless steel tend to really show their spots, and it's impossible to avoid causing these marks if you ever want to actually use your appliances. Unfortunately, all too often, the cleaning methods you might use for the rest of your kitchen only contribute further to smudging and streaking. What's a stainless steel owner to do? Look in your bathroom.

The secret to easily and effectively clearing stainless steel of fingerprints and streaks is shaving cream. It might sound strange, but it works — don't you just love it when the best cleaning solutions are everyday staples you already have? All you have to do is apply one pump of shaving cream onto a microfiber cloth — you never want to clean stainless steel with paper towels, as they're more abrasive, so they can leave scratches and smudges as well as their own fibers behind — and do some firm but gentle buffing. Alternatively, you can apply a thin layer of shaving cream right onto a surface, leave it for a few minutes, then use that cloth to buff. Then you'll want to wet a separate, clean cloth to buff any remaining shaving cream away. Tada: Shiny, spot-free stainless steel.

Shaving cream cleans effectively because it shares a lot of ingredients with soaps, as well as moisturizers — so it's capable but gentle enough not to create its own marks. This is one satisfying hack, considering that when you're using something already in your house, you're not spending any money. Plus, this is something made to put onto your skin, so you can rest assured it doesn't have any harmful chemicals. You can also use shaving cream in the kitchen to clean smudges and stains off of wooden cabinets and tables, get rid of hard water stains that might be near your sink, and even eliminate spills on any rugs or carpets.

If you don't have shaving cream, you'll be happy to know there are some other home essentials that can also, surprisingly, do the trick really well. Olive oil can remove spots and restore stainless steel's shine, too — just like shaving cream, you'd buff surfaces with it on a microfiber cloth, then buff again with a clean, wet cloth. Meanwhile, back in the bathroom, hair conditioner is super effective for shining up stainless steel. The same ingredients that create a barrier around your hair strands against grime do just that for stainless steel.

It's important to remember that these solutions don't actually clean surfaces, as in disinfecting them. You'll want to use solutions to eliminate bacteria first, then take this step to get stainless steel looking new and shiny again.