Sometimes, when dealing with a mess, you have to bring out the big guns. In the cleaning world, one of the big guns is super-powerful melamine foam, known to all of us as Procter & Gamble’s Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Using a bit of chemistry (rather than magic), the company has created the sorcerer’s stone of cleaning supplies. If you’ve been in a cleaning situation where nothing seems to work, chances are good that a Magic Eraser might. This list contains some of the usual uses along with some lesser-known applications.
- Use it for its original purpose: Deep-clean set-in grease stains on your stove top. (Do this if you haven’t tried it yet: It’s just a great feeling when you swipe and everything’s gone.)
- Clean your shoes and remove grass stains.
- Remove tarnish from silver.
- Remove rust from pretty much anything.
- Polish jewelry.
- Did your child go nuts with crayons on your walls? Remove the marks quickly with a Magic Eraser.
- Use an eraser to scuff up that nasty, dried soap scum or bath ring in your tub or shower.
- In a bigger body of water, you can clean a water mark on a pool liner.
- In a smaller body of water, cut off a little piece of foam and let it sit in the toilet bowl overnight to clean it.
- It can clean grout! (How often can a cleaning product actually clean grout?)
- Fix your car’s finish after a minor run-in: Remove a scratch on your car’s paint job. You can also clean the steering wheel, the tires, and the hubcaps.
- Get out the most impossible-to-remove stains, like nail polish, hair dye, paint, and ink.
- If you like to do DIY projects that require old glass jars, get started by removing the labels and price tags and removing the sticky gunk left behind by rubbing with a Magic Eraser.
- Leather couches, jackets, purses, and upholstery can be cleaned with a Magic Eraser.
- Clean your outdoor plastic furniture.
- In your most difficult dish-washing situations, like tomato stains in plastic containers, rings in casserole dishes, or tea stains in mugs, try gently rubbing a Magic Eraser on it. (Make sure to wash out the container with regular dish soap afterward.)
- I personally find this very disgusting: cleaning bird droppings. But you can do it with this magical product.
- A close second in top disgusting things to clean up is removing dried-on dead bugs on a car windshield. That can also include bugs on siding on a house or on RV awnings.
- A great way to attack the built-up gunk made of mysterious condiments stuck on the inside of your refrigerator is with one of these.
- Clean window screens.
- Gently wipe down your electronics, like your computer monitor, flat-screen TV, smartphones, tablets, and keyboard.
- Get up scuff marks from baseboards and floors.
- If someone drew on your dry-erase surface with a permanent marker, don’t throw it out: Just try rubbing it off with a Magic Eraser!