Make Your Life Easier By Tossing This Bathroom Item In The Dishwasher

Maintaining a nice clean bathroom often feels like a never-ending cycle of wiping down mirrors and scrubbing tiles. But one of the most common culprits of bathroom grime sits right under your nose, or rather, right under your hands, often going overlooked. Your beautiful soap dish is designed to keep your bathroom countertop tidy, but it's a magnet for the stubborn waxy buildup of soap scum. This nasty residue is a cocktail of body runoff (like oil and dirt) and soap reacting with the mineral deposits in your tap water. Because soap dishes are constantly exposed to moisture, they don't just get sticky. They become a big-time site for bacterial growth and mildew that can eventually create hygiene issues. But fortunately, there's an easy way to keep them clean: Put yours in the dishwasher.

It doesn't seem like it should be difficult to manually wash a soap dish. But the actual challenge lies in their odd-shaped design. The most effective dishes have areas like deep ridges and drainage holes meant to keep the soap from sitting in a pool of water. While that's great for the soap, these crevices are irritating to clean by hand with a cloth, brush, sponge, or anything else. You may have even found yourself hunched over the sink with an old toothbrush scrubbing away at one trying to remove this hardened gunk. It's tough. And let's be honest, not only is this chore not fun, but its not one most of us think about doing to begin with. This is where your dishwasher can step in to help. Pop your soap dish in the machine once a week, and you'll make it as hassle-free as possible to keep it clean and tidy.

Tossing your soap dish into your dishwasher is the ultimate low-effort hack. Why? Dishwashers have high-pressure water jets and sustained heat that can dissolve those waxy lipids and blast away any other gunk hanging out in a crevice. Plus, this process doesn't just remove visible grime. The super high temps in a normal dishwashing cycle effectively kills lingering germs, sanitizing the soap dish and making sure no nastiness will spread from it to your countertop or to you. The hack is a simple way to keep your home tidier, and it's easy to adopt as one of your weekly bathroom-cleaning habits.

Before you load it up into the dishwasher, though, take a moment to double check what your soap dish is made of to make sure it can handle the heat. Hand-painted porcelain, silver, stone, delicate glass, or porous wood dishes are just a few of the things you should never put in the dishwasher; these will require gentle handwashing. By contrast, most ceramic, tempered glass, and heavy-duty plastic dishes are safe for the dishwasher. Feel free to place those soap dishes on the top rack away from the intense heat of the bottom heat source to help prevent warping or cracking. By letting your appliances do the heavy lifting, you'll have a cleaner home with a fraction of the effort.