This May Be the Filthiest Thing in Your Home—And You Never Clean It

You wash your hands when you leave the restroom, and maybe even reach for a paper towel to open the door handle to keep bathroom germs off your hands. You wash your face with skincare products that cost more than the food you eat, and maybe even sleep on fresh pillowcases every night to keep spots off your face. But all of that is for naught—like going to the gym everyday on a diet of donuts—if you’re not taking care of the filth on your cell phone.

That’s right: Each square inch of your cellphone contains roughly 25,000 germs, according to Mashable—dirtier than most kitchen counters, door handles and even toilet seats. But you know that already. You probably read it somewhere and promptly filed that new information into the “If I ever think about this again, I’ll never get through the day” file. No more! It’s time for a reality check—a dirty cell phone could be directly battling your best efforts to stay away from illness and keep acne off your face. So, yeah, it’s kind of important to keep it clean.

You could try and make it a habit to wipe it down every day or every week with a disinfecting wipe, but there may be a better solution that will disinfect your phone while it charges: PhoneSoap.

You might have seen this tabletop gadget on Shark Tank before, but it’s basically a tiny little tanning bed for your phone. At night, or whenever you put your phone down to rest and charge, close your cell into the PhoneSoap device and let it wash your phone with UV light—proven by independent labs to kill 99.9% of the bacteria within.

PhoneSoap is a universal charger, so it works with any cell phone on the market. And the 2.0 edition is big enough to fit the iPhone Plus line and many other phablets. They retail on the PhoneSoap website for $49.99, but if you dig the white colorway, you can snag it right now on Amazon for $36.99.