One woman has a simple hack for all white car drivers who find their vehicle more scuffed up than they’d like.
Ashley (@sasshlleeyy) shared her newly discovered method for getting rid of scratches on her white Toyota Rav 4 in a trending TikTok.
Her secret weapon? A Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.
Her video has garnered over 2,000 views since she posted the clip on Sunday. However, many commenters were wary of her method.
Are white cars the hardest to keep clean?
“I have a PSA for all my girlies with white cars,” Ashley says in the video. “If somebody has dinged your door a little bit and left marks—I just feel like my car accumulates marks so easily.”
Many people think white cars show the most imperfections and are hardest to keep clean. However, several experts argue that white cars may be the easiest, depending on where you live. Take 5 notes that white vehicles’ reflective nature causes scratches, scuffs, and other blemishes to be less visible to the human eye.
Still, scuffs can still be a nuisance for white car drivers like Ashley. And she found a solution that’s sitting in many people’s cleaning cabinets.
“A Magic Eraser will get rid of this,” Ashley says as she scrubs a dark gray scratch off her vehicle’s door with the Mr. Clean product. “And I don’t know how I didn’t know this sooner, but it literally works wonders. Brand new. Insane.”
How do Magic Erasers work?
The main ingredient in Mr. Clean Magic Erasers is melamine foam, a sponge-like structure made from melamine and formaldehyde.
While Magic Erasers may appear to be a simple sponge, they’re more complex than the eye can see. And that complexity is why they’re so effective at cleaning.
The microstructure of melamine resin in foam form is incredibly hard, almost as hard as glass. As Jessika Toothman explains for How Stuff Works, this leads a melamine sponge, like the Magic Eraser, to operate more like very fine sandpaper than a sponge.
Believe it or not, the “magic” removal of stains isn’t magic at all. Rather, the stains are simply being scrubbed away by the fine grit of the foam.
However, the science of melamine sponges led many commenters to warn Ashley about using a Magic Eraser on her car’s paint.
“Melamine is just a high grit sandpaper, it’ll get the job done but you’re risking the paint when you remove the clear coat. Just rub it off with a cloth and water lol,” one viewer commented.
“Your just scratching the scratch even deeper and removing the color the first scratch left,” another wrote.
Ashley responded, “Somehow I think I’ll live. It did what I needed it to do [shrug emoji].”
Is a Magic Eraser safe to use on your car?
Magic Erasers can be used on vehicles, but only if they’re used carefully.
Applying too much pressure on a car with a melamine sponge can cause damage to the vehicle’s paint or clear coat.
“It is pretty difficult to damage something with a Magic Eraser, assuming you’re using it with a little bit of common sense,” Luke Wilson of Wilson Auto Detailing explains.
In a YouTube video, he shows the cloudy abrasion to a car’s paint that overuse of a Magic Eraser can cause. It’s a result of “micro-scratches” to the clear coat, he says.
However, Wilson also shows how to fix the scratches left behind, in case you’ve taken a melamine sponge to your vehicle one too many times.
@sasshlleeyy My white rav 4 girls this is for you! Idk how I didn’t think of using a magic eraser on my car scratches sooner #rav4 #carhack #magiceraser #carscratch ♬ original sound – sasshlleeyy
How to fix damage to your car from a Magic Eraser?
In the same clip, Wilson takes a bit of polish and a microfiber towel to the Magic Eraser damage.
He works the polish into the blemish by hand with quick circles for about 45 seconds.
“It’s totally finished, totally gone,” Wilson says, showing off the car, which no longer has the cloudy abrasion spot.
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