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