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Simple 50 cent office supplies that will remove scratches on your iPhone in SECONDS
Regardless of the make, model or price, your iPhone is a serious investment.
A new or refurbished iPhone can cost anywhere from a few hundred to more than a thousand dollars, not including monthly cellular charges.
While scratches are inevitable with a smartphone used daily like a 21st century Swiss Army knife, there are cost-effective ways to restore your iPhone’s surfaces to the sleek, minimalist heights of Apple’s modernist design.
The best is a quick hack that comes straight from the old-fashioned fixes used by professional photographers to remove a tricky lens scratch in an instant: all you need is a clean, new, soft, white rubber eraser.
As old-school photographers know, a gentle rub with a new white rubber eraser, first in the direction of the scratch and then up and down the scratched area, can do wonders for buffing out scuff marks on your iPhone. This well-worn iPhone model above may be too far gone
A 12 pack of these simple erasers will cost you about $5.85 now on Amazon, which means you can make a beat-up iPhone look as good as new for just 50 cents.
Just like with a camera lens, your first step is to thoroughly clean the surfaces with a microfiber cloth to remove any dirt or debris that could interfere with this hack.
Once that’s done, first rub the eraser very gently in the direction of the scratch, from left to right, for about 30 to 60 seconds. Then rub the eraser up and down the scratched area for 30 to 60 seconds.
While you can also use the kind of eraser that comes on the end of a pencil, make sure you don’t use an old eraser that is coarse or abrasive. Otherwise, you run the risk of making more scratches than you wipe off.
If you repeat the process several times, you will notice that the eraser has gently filled in the scratch. But, like CNET cautioned while discussing this and other methods, “Don’t press too hard!”
If the eraser technique isn’t working for you, or if you’re in a hurry with only other items on hand, there are two other options you could try: toothpaste or certain car polishing products.
With toothpaste, keep in mind that it should be real paste, not one of the myriad of colorful translucent gels toothpastes. As the DailyMail.com illustrated years ago, if a phone has a single crack, one of the easiest ways to temporarily fix it is to smooth out the line with white toothpaste to make it disappear.
CNET’s Alina Bradford found that this technique was less effective on screens compared to cases, but even more effective on plastic iPhone cases such as OtterBox.
In terms of automotive products, both car wax and headlight lens creams hold promise as they are meant to work on the same types of heavily engineered, durable yet lightweight materials.
“I tried Mother’s PowerPlastic 4Lights headlight cream,” Bradford said. “It faded the scratches considerably and I loved the shine it gave my screen.”