(dramatic music)
(buffer buzzing loudly)
- [Joanna] How can this
coating still be on here?
Okay, some back story on why I did this
to a brand new iPhone 8.
You may have heard of this thing called.
- The coronavirus.
- Coronavirus.
- The coronavirus outbreak.
- And that everyone wants
to clean off everything with
well, just about anything
to protect themselves.
- You may have also heard
that you should never, ever,
ever, use liquid cleaning
supplies on your smartphone.
That's because your smartphone screen has
a protective coating to
repel both water and oil.
You may have heard it marketed
as the oleophobic coating.
Basically, it minimizes
fingerprints and smudges.
You can see the difference here.
The left side of this phone
has the oleophobic coating,
the right side doesn't.
Then I placed a drop of
olive oil on each side.
You can see that on the coating side,
the oil droplet quickly repels,
on the side with no coating,
it sticks and has a harder
time coming off the screen.
The chemicals and abrasive materials
in some cleaning products
can destroy that coating.
In fact, after many years of saying,
just use a microfiber cloth,
Apple okayed the use of
disinfecting wipes like Clorox
and Lysol and wipes with
70% isopropyl alcohol,
but how many wipes does it
take to take off this coating
and what does it look like
when the coating's all gone?
I scrubbed a lot for science.
(playful upbeat music)
Now we're talking.
(buffer humming)
I wanted to preserve the
oleophobic coating on one side
of the screen so I covered
that side with paper
and tape then I began
scrubbing the other side
with these Clorox disinfecting wipes.
I did 365 wipes.
I figured one scrub a day for a year.
This feels very wasteful.
And
one.
Two.
(clicker clicking)
365!
I did not let it dry for
the recommended four minutes
because, well, I have a life.
I really should've worn gloves.
I'm super wrinkled, like,
I just took a bath in Clorox wipes.
The results?
The coating was totally fine.
So I decided to keep wiping
for another two years.
(clicker clicking)
Even after 1,095 wipes, the
coating appeared intact.
The screen still felt smooth
and repelled the oil and water.
So I upped the challenge
using some explicitly
banned cleaning supplies.
Is this on right?
I was told that hydrochloric acid found
in toilet bowl cleaner
would destroy the coating.
After 10 minutes of scrubbing with it,
it seemed totally fine.
A Magic Eraser, which has abrasives.
Still pretty fine.
I'm doing a lot of squeaking.
Though I only did it
for about two minutes.
Car buffer?
Nah, but it was fun.
(buffer humming)
Finally, I decided to go all out.
After two hours in a tub
of toilet bowl sauce,
the coating was finally
starting to come off.
I topped it off with some
soft scrub with bleach
and nail polish remover.
We've heard acetone is bad for screens,
there's acetone and nail polish remover.
Help me!
Finally, as you can see,
the oil on the right side
of the screen were the coating
had been stripped began
to repel much slower than on the left.
But you don't have to
go to all these lengths
to take off the coating.
It turns out that after normal
use the oleophobic coating
on any phone will just start to wear.
By the way, the phone worked
and turned on perfectly fine
at the end of all of this.
So after all of this, what do you do?
If you're just looking to
clean your phone cosmetically,
get a microfiber cloth
but if you wanna disinfect
and kill all the germs,
use a disinfecting wipe.
Heck, use 365 of them.
If you're still worried
and you don't like getting your hands wet,
you could try a UV phone sanitizer,
like this $100 PhoneSoap Go
that promises to kill 99%
of bacteria and germs.
I did not test that claim myself.
I now resign as the leading
phone cleaning columnist
at The Wall Street Journal.
I'm never testing phone cleaning again.
Never.
