This Cleaning Hack Got My Hairbrush Spotless — With Just 3 Household Ingredients

Can I be honest with you? I shed hair all over the house. And the problem only got worse during the pandemic, during which period I suspect I lost more hair due to, you know, unprecedented stress. But my thinning mane isn’t the only problem — that’s what hair vitamins are for. It’s the resulting cleanup that really gets to me.  Every time I do my hair, tons of strands end up in my brush, which means I’m spending more time pulling hair out of the bristles than actually styling. 

As always, TikTok was right on time with a super-easy, surprisingly effective solution to one of my biggest gripes, this time thanks to a third-generation janitor who goes by Clean That Up. Here’s the best part of the hack: If you’re a hair-loser like me: You’ll only need an hour and three basic ingredients — which you probably already have on hand at home — to fully rehab your brush: warm water, shampoo, and a toothpick.

The TikTok has more than 600,000 likes, and it’s pretty intuitive, so I had no doubt it would be a game-changer. But before I could recommend it, I obviously had to try the hair removal trick out myself. followed the steps from the video precisely: I grabbed my prized pink hairbrush, added warm water to a medium-sized container, then pumped in a few drops of shampoo. After I mixed the solution a bit, I put my brush in bristle-side down, then set a timer for an hour and let it soak.

Once the sixty minutes passed, I turned over the brush and could immediately tell the knotted strands would be so easy to remove. Reader, they were! With my toothpick, I pulled out the wreckage in one fell swoop, then rinsed under the sink for a few seconds to remove the remaining suds. Not only was my brush finally hair-free; it was clean and smelled fresh, too!

I’m hoping to lose fewer strands these days (I swear by those influencer-famous SugarBearHair vitamins), but from now on, I’ll be keeping the toothpicks in the bathroom for the next time I inevitably find more hair in my hairbrush.