Tips for Cleaning Mirrors

Mirrors offer a great way to create a feeling of space and openness in a room. Large mirrors can be used to great effect in make a living room for example appear twice as spacious. Smaller mirrors meanwhile are just as useful if you have a blank wall space which is crying out to be filled with some special little design touches.

But, of course, putting the mirror up is only the first step. As with all décor, you'll need to provide it with some care and maintenance every so often. Mirrors do have to be cleaned if they are going to achieve their full potential – it is in fact probably even more important with mirrors than with other household décor items which don’t revolve so centrally around their reflective capacity.

A regular clean however will make all the difference and shouldn’t take too long out of your day. There are however a number of tips which it might be useful to bear in mind that will make this process as efficient and effective as possible.

Wipe Away the Dust

One quick and easy job to take care of when it comes to keeping you mirror clean is dusting. It doesn’t take too long for dust to gather on a mirror, even in a room which is always nice and clean. Thankfully, it is a stress-free task to get on top of that. All you need to do is take a dust cloth, which you are sure is clean, and wipe away those dusty deposits.

Don’t Forget Those Edges

When you have cleaned the main body of the mirror, you will need to make sure that you don’t overlook those edges. What you will want to do here is use something that you will be able to manipulate easily so as to get at those tight angles. You might have joy therefore with some cotton swabs or a soft toothbrush.

Spot Clean

It is a similar case which specific spots which you can see need cleaning. This is most often the case in the bathroom, where a mirror may have been cleaned overall recently, but has picked up a small spot of toothpaste for example. As you need to be precise, a cotton swab would once more be a good option to tackle the job at hand. Simply dab the swab in some rubbing alcohol and you can then focus on the spot that needs cleaning rather than re-cleaning the whole thing. The rubbing alcohol in addition will mean that you are not just hiding the marks like some cleaning sprays do, but actually getting rid of that which is causing them.

Vinegar Solution – The Ideal Solution

Despite there being a whole range of different cleaning products on sale with detailed descriptions on the packaging of how effective they are, the best method for achieving a streak-free clean is a simple DIY vinegar solution. It is in fact the soapy content of many store-bought cleaning sprays that causes streaks. A simple one to one solution of vinegar and distilled water should do the trick.

Straight to the Cloth

With the vinegar solution, or indeed with rubbing alcohol, another key tip is to apply it straight to the cloth rather than straight to the mirror. If you spray it all over the mirror, then it will likely gather in the corners and then may seep under the reflective surface, thus eventually causing damage whereby the mirror may develop dark patches.

Lint-free Zone

Using a paper towel or a rag can actually be causing residue in the form of lint deposits as you clean. This is why it is more beneficial to use a microfibre cloth, so that you won’t be wiping lint onto your mirror, and therefore will be doing the job more effectively and not causing yourself to have an extra job of having to clean it twice.