Pinterest Lab: Toothpaste as Headlight Cleaner

I am drawn to using things for unintended purposes. Leigh’s post about hydrogen peroxide and Dawn as a stain remover is a case in point. So, I was cruising Pinterest and saw this pin all about using toothpaste for other purposes besides brushing your teeth. It got my attention. Some of the stuff they said toothpaste could be used for included cleaning fine jewelry and silver, cleaning walls, removing stains from carpet, fixing walls, fixing scratched CDs and DVDs just to name a few.

The one that really caught my attention was it said toothpaste could be used to clean headlights. Hey! My car headlights needed cleaning and it sounded like an easy experiment and one for which I had all the necessary ingredients: toothpaste, warm water and some sort of scrubbing utensil.

Toothpaste Pintesting 101

Like I said, my car headlights were looking a little grungy and I had everything I needed to test this pin, so I got to it.

Before Anything

The instructions from the pin said to mix toothpaste with warm water and scrub your car headlights. Okay, easy enough. As I was doing this, Bub returned home from running errands and was all gung-ho about this little experiment. After this first application of toothpaste and rinsing it off— there was 100% no results. None. Zilch. Nada. Bub suggested skipping the water-mixing and use a wax buffer.

Toothpaste Take 2

So, we tried this and really, only got minimal results:

2 Applications

It was at this point that Bub traipsed over to the shed and brought out a bottle of cleaner wax.

Store Bought Stuff

I should have known that he would have something that was actually intended to achieve the outcome I was looking to achieve with the toothpaste! Bub did say that the toothpaste might have failed us because it was a gel formula toothpaste rater than a paste- we’ll never know why the toothpaste didn’t work- maybe because it’s intended to clean teeth, not car headlights.

Anyway, Bub fetched Mequire’s Cleaner Wax and got busy with it on my car headlights.

Bub wax

Throughout this entire process, we had a spectator- an onlooker if you will that kept mumbling about walking the plank!

Ahoy Matey

As you might have guessed, the cleaner wax worked wonders and really did make my car headlights look almost brand new!

Cleaner Wax

A Headlight

As you can see, the toothpaste did make a slight improvement but the real sparkle came from the cleaner wax. This was a very easy Pinterest Lab Experiment. Although, I have to say- I will probably just leave the toothpaste to its intended purpose.

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Coralie

4 Comments

  1. I’m with Bubs on this one… I would be curious to see if the paste component changed the outcome. I’ve done several pintests where you have to have EXACTLY the right product… though I would walk the plank with that pirate any day.

  2. I’m wondering if the toothpaste has similar properties on other objects. Like, if I put some toothpaste on the charcoal grill out back, will my husband come out and clean it until it shines?

  3. I’ve pre-emptively put toothpaste on everything in the house… wait…

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