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Once again I am subjecting myself to humiliation for the sake of homemaking science by showing you another nasty appliance in my house. This time I need to clean a flat iron. Why is this flat iron so gross you ask? Well, let me tell you. I suffer from a serious condition called “poufy bangs” – combined with a wicked cowlick. Unless I straighten them every day…(sometimes twice a day)…they just look ridiculous.
Problem is…I also use a fair amount of HAIRSPRAY on them and when I use the flat iron on my hairsprayed hair…this is what ends up happening.
A serious case of “gunk build-up”. The things we do for vanity. :-)
In the past, I would wait until it got REALLY, REALLY bad and then throw it away and get a new one….because I couldn’t find anything that would take it off. One day I was whining about my flat iron follies to my friend Danielle and she suggested I use the edge of a pair of scissors to scrape the gunk off. After all, the straightener is made out of CERAMIC. It worked quite well and didn’t do TOO much damage to the iron. The slight scarring it did was worth it though, because I didn’t have to buy a new one! An expensive proposition.
As you can see from the pictures…the “gunk build-up” was approaching a serious level of gross and I was about to attack it with the scissors again when I decided to give my “miracle cleaner” a try.
Turns out this was hardly even a challenge for the “miracle cleaner”. :-) I made my usual paste of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide and started rubbing it in with my fingers. It immediately took all but the thickest parts of gunk off with hardly any effort at all.
This is what it looked like “AFTER”.
The main difference in cleaning this small appliance vs. other things I’ve cleaned with the “miracle cleaner” was making sure I didn’t get any cleaner or water inside the iron that would mess up the electrical stuff.
So I was careful to keep the cleaning mixture just on the plates themselves and then I used a wet rag to wipe it all off when I was done instead of rinsing it. It’s still working like a champ at taming my unruly poufy bangs, so I must have done OK.
My flat iron looks and feels like new!
How do you clean your flat iron?
