(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.