I thought I was clean
I need to tell you that before I tell you what I found out. I want you to know that this is not a confession of a home-wrecker. I vacuumed. I cleaned surfaces. I took my shoes off at the door. My kitchen was tidy, my bedroom was reasonably organized and my bathroom was scrubbed clean on the weekends with the kind of righteous satisfaction that made me feel virtuous.
I was deluding myself. My delusion took a bath one Wednesday afternoon when a dermatologist looked at my face, looked at the brush I'd brought with me in a ziplock bag as requested and said five words that would change the way I cleansed forever. "This is the likely cause."
I had been plagued with breakouts for three months. Small bumps that refused to be tamed with new products, a textured feel to my cheeks that only grew worse when I tried to mask it with concealer and occasional, unwelcomed little flares of rash around my eyes that I blamed on screen time and the desert climate and allergies and anything really except the thing I pressed against my face for ten minutes every morning.
That dermatologist was the beginning of a long and eye-opening journey into the world of cleanliness that started with my makeup brushes but didn't end there.
The Thing I Touched Every Morning
Let's start with the beginning: the thing that caused me to embark on this particular quest for cleanliness in the first place: my makeup brushes.
I had owned my foundation brush for about eight months. It was a nice brush. My skin tolerated it well and it had a comfortable grip. I took care of it by giving it a quick swirl in soapy water about every three to four weeks. Rinse and spin until it was clean, pat it dry on a towel and leave it to finish drying on a rack overnight. I didn't know any better; most of the blogs I followed advised to clean brushes every two to four weeks.
What those bloggers didn't know (or at least didn't share) was the science of what happened inside the bristles between cleanings.
Every time you use a brush, its bristles absorb some of whatever product you're applying with it as well as dead skin cells and dirt from your face, sweat and environmental pollutants. Within hours, that warm, moist base has become a breeding ground for bacteria. Within two weeks, bacteria found in your foundation brush will be comparable to that of a kitchen sponge. After four weeks, research shows that it may exceed the bacteria content of a toilet seat.
And I was pressing my face against this bacterial battleground every day for ten minutes. No wonder it was breaking out!
The dermatologist's advice was simple. Clean your brushes more frequently and make sure to clean them thoroughly, getting rid of all moisture so that bacteria can't thrive on it. The problem with that advice was time. A thorough brush cleaning (manual) takes about five to ten minutes per brush. That's an hour of my life that I'll never get back every week if I'm using six to ten brushes (the average for most makeup-wearing women who want to keep their foundation from looking cakey). Plus, once you've cleaned the brush, it needs to dry completely (about twelve to twenty-four hours) so that you can use it again. That leaves me with no brushes for an entire day.
It was an unreasonable amount to ask for. No wonder I didn't do it!
The solution was an electric brush cleaner that spins the brush while it washes and dries it with powerful centrifugal force, eliminating moisture from the bristles. All I had to do was attach my brush to the spinning chamber, dip it in cleaning solution and press start. The machine did the rest, spinning it at high speeds to remove product buildup and bacteria from inside the bristles and then using powerful centrifugal force to dry the brush in seconds. A brush that used to take twenty-four hours to dry after a manual cleaning was completely clean and dry in under a minute.
You may be wondering how many brushes I had. All eight of them, cleaned on my first evening with the new brush cleaner. The water in the cleaning basin had turned an alarming shade of brown (I can't bring myself to describe it in detail).
After the second brush, the water was nearly the same color. After the fourth, I stopped paying attention to what the water looked like because I was too busy staring at the brush in horror.
It was all worth it. As I used my freshly cleaned brushes the next morning, I could see the difference. My foundation went on more smoothly and my blending brush didn't have that uncomfortable drag that I had mistaken for poor brush quality. My skin felt different too. Less irritated, less textured, healthier overall.
Within two weeks of cleaning my brushes every three to four days as instructed, the small bumps on my jawline had gone away and my cheek texture had improved considerably. The itty-bitty rashes around my eyes were gone too. After three months of misery, two wasted skincare product purchases and one expensive dermatologist visit, I finally had my answer. It hadn't been my skin. It had been the brush.
I clean my brushes every three days now. It takes another eight minutes to clean all eight of them, but every one is immediately usable afterward. The brush cleaner (which costs less than one of the skincare products mentioned above) sees regular use. It has dramatically changed my skincare routine for the better.
The Room I Thought Was Clean
The dermatologist had shaken me to the core. This was not the first time I had been disillusioned with the concept of cleanliness, but this was the most personal. If my makeup brushes (which I cleaned every three weeks) were hiding bacteria from me, what other sacred cleaning rituals were failing me on a daily basis?
The answer, it seems, was the room I cleaned the most: my bathroom.
I scrubbed my bathroom every weekend. I took pride in it, even boasted about it to my guests. It always smelled sparkling clean and looked presentable. What I didn't know was that appearances were the only benefit I was reaping from my weekend efforts. I didn't understand that "looks clean" and "is clean" were two entirely different things.
It took me getting on my hands and knees (again) one afternoon to look at the bathroom floor in detail to finally see the truth.
I was inspecting the lines between the tiles when I noticed the discoloration. Small flecks of black and brown ran lengthwise through the grout lines about two inches in from the edges. My weekend cleaning ritual didn't reach that far. In fact, it barely reached the tiles themselves. It looked clean, but it wasn't.
I moved to examine the shower enclosure next. The glass door had a cloudy film across it that I knew was caused by hard water, but the track along the bottom and the silicone seals were dark and pitted. Mildew was growing in the grooves of the door, and mold spots dotted the lower part of the enclosure. The whole room looked dirty if I focused on these specific areas, but if I stood back, it appeared quite tidy.
The problem wasn't that I wasn't cleaning hard enough. It was that I was cleaning the wrong surfaces. My spray bottle and cloth were doing a sufficient (but superficial) job on the large, smooth surfaces of the tiles and glass but didn't reach the crevices, the grout lines and the silicone seals where bacteria and mold thrived.
The solution to this particular problem was something I had thought I had in my possession: a cordless electric scrubber that had two speeds (for delicate surfaces like glass and for more robust tile and grout). The motorized scrubber's rotating brush heads did all the hard work for me. Their high-powered motor did a far more effective job than my hands ever could, cleaning the nooks and crannies of the bathroom without me having to kneel on the damp tiles and hurt my back in the process.
I ran the scrubber over the grout lines and watched as the discoloration lift away to reveal clean white grout. The brush heads snuck into the crevices and pulled out the offending black mold from the shower enclosure with ease. Within seconds, the entire bathroom went from "looks clean" to "is clean".
My bathroom cleaning time was cut in half (the entire process took about twelve minutes) and the reward for my efforts was a sparkling clean bathroom. I couldn't believe how much difference such a small change had made. It was the last time I had hired someone to deep-clean the bathroom, which had been seven months ago.
The Place I Sat in Every Day and Never Questioned
By this point, I had fallen victim to what my partner called "hygiene paranoia" and what I liked to think of as "a healthy skepticism of the state of the places I permitted myself to touch." I had cleaned my brushes and scrubbed my bathroom, but now I turned my attention to the place I spent the most time in: my car.
I had a forty-five minute commute each way, five days a week. I spent about seven and a half hours in my car every week. I ate in my car, I drank my coffee in my car and I even put on lip balm in my car. I brought my bag with me, tracking dust and other particulate matter from my apartment to the office and back. I rarely had a vacuuming session for my car. When I did, it was a professional detailer who could give it a superficial cleaning in about four minutes for ₹500.
I didn't think of my car as dirty. It didn't look dirty or smell dirty. The seats didn't look grimy, the dashboard wasn't full of ugly dust bunnies and the center console didn't have any random, suspicious-looking stains on it. I was satisfied with the state of my car until the brush-and-bathroom revelations, when I realized that "does not look dirty" was not the standard I should hold myself to if I expected to achieve true cleanliness.
I pulled the front passenger seat forward so I could see what the floor looked like behind it. There were crumbs, stray bits of hair and a few random receipts from four months ago. I had been sitting on these for almost a year, unknowingly. There were dust bunnies growing along the edges of the seat covers, and when I lifted the small fold-out mats from the foot-well, I found another fine layer of grayish dust. I ran my fingers along the edge of the cup-holders and pulled away bits of grime that I wasn't particularly interested in identifying.
Research had told me that the average car had seven hundred bacteria per square centimeter on the steering wheel (which I touched constantly) and gear-stick (which I grabbed a few times a day) compared to about five hundred on the average public toilet seat. The average car seat had twice as much bacteria as an average elevator button and the air vents were collecting dust and mold spores that I was inhaling at a steady rate with every drive.
I did not spend seven and a half hours a week breathing in bacteria from my car's interior. I ate in it and touched my face after touching potentially germ-infested surfaces and cleaned it twice a year. That's when I discovered the cordless car vacuum with a brush-less motor that sucked up dust and dirt with such efficiency that it saw regular use.
The first time I vacuumed my car (myself) was an eye-opening experience. I had a full canister of dirt from underneath the seats and another one from the dashboard vents. The air vents had produced a visible plume of dust when I used the brush attachment to loosen it up and get it out, and the area around the pedals had produced enough fine grit to fill a bowl.
It took me about twenty minutes to vacuum my car clean using this particular vacuum. The professional detailer had taken four minutes to do a superficial job. The vacuum itself cost me less than four professional cleanings and now I used it every two weeks to keep my car at a standard of cleanliness that the professional detailer had never reached.
What gets me is how long I had been sitting in my car without knowing just how filthy it was. How many hours had I spent inhaling mold spores and bacteria? How many commuter coffees had I drunk from a potentially germ-infested cup-holder? How many unimportant phone calls had I made with the windows up so that the recirculated air from the vents would blow across my face?
I was spending most of my waking hours in a car that I hadn't really cleaned in almost a year, and I was doing it all while spending good money on skincare products to take care of a skin condition that had nothing to do with an allergic reaction to car upholstery.
What I Know Now
I started this project because of a breakout and finished it questioning everything I knew about cleanliness, but now that I've finished, I want to share with you what I've learned.
When it comes to cleanliness, it's easy to be deceived by what we see (or don't see). My makeup brushes looked clean, but they had been harboring bacteria colonies that were attacking my skin every night. My bathroom looked clean, but underneath the surface, I had been battling mold and mildew. My car didn't look dirty at all, but every time I sat inside it, I was inhaling mold spores and bacteria that made me sick.
The things I purchased to help me clean were fairly cheap and simple. The brush cleaner that spun my makeup brushes clean and dry in under a minute cost me less than one skincare product. The same applied to the electric scrubber I used in the bathroom and the car vacuum that extracted two full canisters of filth from my car's interior. All three of these purchases were necessities for me, but they're actually options for you as well. The reason I bought them was because I thought I was being deceived by appearances.
If you feel that way too, then you're in for quite the surprise.