(Image credit: Future)
If you've ever become engrossed in CleanTok, that TikTok community dedicated to strangely-satisfying cleaning videos, you've probably watched influencers dunk their old, yellowed pillows into a bathtub full of household items to make them sparkly clean.So compelling are these videos that I sometimes forget that the people who confidently guide me through their hacks are not professional cleaners but simply TikTok account holders with a bathtub and some grubby pillows. In fact, many CleanTok videos go against expert-approved cleaning advice on how to wash a pillow."I would be cautious because these household products were not formulated or tested as complete fabric cleaners," says Shamsa Kanwal, M.D., a board-certified dermatologist and medical writer at MyPsoriasisTeam. "Standard laundering methods are more reliable because they are designed to lift sweat, skin oil, saliva, cosmetics, and other residue from fabric and rinse them away."That's why I took bunch of old, grubby pillows with deep set stains to test five CleanTok hacks and to see how they compare against three gold-standard pillow cleaning techniques used by specialists and in hotels. Here's how it all went...Key takeaways: At a glanceViral TikTok pillow cleaning trends (like shaving foam and vodka) are mostly visually-pleasing, clout-chasing quick-fixes that fail to completely remove deep-set, stubborn stains.Spritzing a 3% hydrogen peroxide and water mixture, scrubbing it in, and running the pillow through a standard wash cycle outperformed all other methods, lifting tough stains and restoring brightness.While soaking pillows in a bath of soda crystals yielded weak results, adding them directly to the washing machine drum proved far more effective for fading severe discoloration.However, the safest expert-recommended approach is to follow the pillow's care label and make sure its dried completely before using. The pillow stains I needed to remove
