I Tested Viral TikTok Cleaning Products

(upbeat music)

♪ This is Safiya's new intro song ♪

- Hello, friends, and welcome to another video.

This week, I'm gonna be testing out

some TikTok viral cleaning products.

Pay no attention to the robot cleaning the window.

Now, TikTok is a pretty crazy place.

Beyond being the home of the hamster rave,

the year-long cruise and founding father

bachelorette parties, it also has a very adaptive algorithm

that with the flick of a finger,

can funnel you into different silos

of content on the platform.

Like cat Tok, LOTR Tok,

head spot Tok, croissant Tok, Edgar Allen Poe Tok,

et cetera, et cetera.

And as some of you guys might know,

I watch a lot of content.

When it can be theoretically excused

as part of my job, it's very easy to hop down a rabbit hole

of "Bridgerton" memes or "SpongeBob" cosplays.

And a Tok that I've fallen in and out

of over the past couple of years actually

is this bizarre smart home ASMR cleaning Tok,

which is a genre of videos,

sometimes with characters and narratives and sometimes not

where the protagonist goes around

their highly organized apartment

and uses very niche specific smart devices

to clean every nook and cranny.

This is an offshoot from just normal clean Tok.

There are of course cleaning products

that go viral just generally on TikTok,

but the videos we're talking about here

are home optimizing, thousands of tiny packages,

ASMR cleaning Tok.

And I find these videos to be absolutely mesmerizing.

Not only do I enjoy the clicking

and clacking of the ASMR elements,

but I'm also always enthralled

by what gadget they're gonna pull out next

because it's always something

I've never even thought of before.

It's a shoe dryer, a toothpaste dispenser,

a crab disinfector, a window Roomba.

And after a while I realized

I wasn't the only person on this side of TikTok.

- She's taking the batteries out the door

so he can't get back in, and now she's going on Amazon.

- And it could be my civic duty as a YouTuber

to investigate this phenomenon as best as I can.

- Okay, now that is brilliant, what the hell does that do?

It's a washing machine?

- And see if I can actually track down

some of these gadgets and test them out

to see if they're really as satisfying as they seem,

or if they even do anything at all.

All right, so I think it's time

to get us some cleaning products and clean,

before TikTok gets banned for good.

But before we head off, I do wanna give a quick shout out

to the sponsor of this video

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I love Opera's Tab Island feature,

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like this is my TikTok Cleaning Products Workspace.

This is my laser hair regrowth helmet workspace.

This is my Sixers merch workspace, RIP Tyler.

And Opera also helps optimize your internet experience

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So with that, thanks again to Opera

and now back to cleaning.

Now I've been seeing these ASMR cleaning videos on TikTok

for at least a couple of years

and it's taken us about six months to track down,

order, receive, and test some of these gadgets.

So admittedly, we may be a bit late to the trend here,

but having spent the past few months screen recording

and gathering these videos,

I can confirm that there is a lot to unpack here.

Like there are a lot of tropes that the genre has,

which I find very intriguing.

First off, a lot of these videos do have

some kind of narrative that they start off with at least,

I guess to try and explain why you would need

to go on a cleaning spree.

For example, the protagonist might be sitting around

eating sunflower seeds and bam,

her rich mother-in-law is unexpectedly outside

and she's about to come upstairs,

and the apartment better be clean

by the time she gets there.

Or the protagonist is very angry

at her spouse for whatever reason,

maybe she found his ex's hair on him

using a lint roller.

And so to get back at him, she spends a bunch of money

and orders a ton of cleaning gadgets,

which she then opens and uses to clean their apartment.

Or the protagonist secretly has ordered a bunch of packages

and doesn't want her spouse to know about it.

So she has to cut off a piece of her hair,

sneak out of bed, and open the packages

and clean the apartment in the dead of night.

I think this is an angry mother-in-law

watching disapprovingly.

A lot of these videos are also framed

as just simple nighttime or morning routines,

like a simple, "This is what I do when I get home from work

to unwind, unbox a thousand packages,

clean, cook, use a foot bath, et cetera."

But even in these simple routine videos,

there are often absurd details included

to catch the viewer's attention

and drive comments and engagement.

For example, sometimes it's snowing in the hallway

of the protagonist's apartment building

or a rat runs across the screen

or there's money in the washing machine,

or say, the protagonist is a slender lady,

but for a quick shot, her leg becomes a hairy man's leg.

Top comment on that video, leg. Hook, line, and sinker.

So they use almost 5-Minute Craftian methods of seduction

to really lure you into their optimized cleaning world.

But after watching at this point, dozens of these videos,

my next questions were who is making these videos and why?

And also, how do I buy any of these things?

Now we did find these videos posted across

many accounts on TikTok,

and although there are a few repeat offenders

like Douyin House, Eevan Home, Household Goodies 5,

amongst others, that doesn't make it super clear

who exactly is making these videos

and where they're coming from.

And it doesn't help that like with many

content aggregator-type accounts on TikTok,

sometimes these accounts disappear

and reappear based on some of the account names

like Douyin House and Your Asian Home.

And text on screen and spoken lines in the videos,

we can deduce that a vast majority

of these videos come from China.

Douyin is basically Chinese TikTok.

We did find out a little bit more

about where exactly these videos come from

and the greater trend of why they might be being made,

but I'll save that for a bit later on in the video.

But in our quest to figure out how to actually get

some of these gadgets,

thankfully at least a few of these accounts

did have storefronts that they linked to

that had some of these products.

Some of them don't and seem just to be posting

this type of content for the views,

since it's a pretty popular genre.

But we were directed through the accounts Smart Home Gadgets

and Smart Home Toy Beta to the website's Ulikefit

and SmartHome999, which did seem to offer

a fair amount of the gadgets we had seen.

So that was a place to start at least.

And when deciding which products to actually get and test

from the basically hundreds of gadgets

featured in these videos,

we did try and take stock

of which products showed up the most.

Now, not all of these gadgets are just cleaning products.

There are a fair amount of them

that are like professional organization items

like shoe racks, lazy Susans and grain organizers.

Some that are smart decor

like the Bluetooth charging bedside table

and some that are cooking gadgets,

like self-cooking pots and steaming towers.

But I've always felt that the cleaning products

were the real foundation of this smart home genre.

So we focused on those,

and the first product we ended up pursuing

was this blue light water sprayer cleaner thing.

That's what we're calling it for now.

Now this genre of light cleaning products is very popular.

A common one is what looks like

a UV sanitizing utensil holder.

And there's also this illuminated

contact lens cleaner case.

But this just general blue light sprayer thingy

is featured a lot across these videos,

seemingly as a way to rapidly disinfect things and yourself

and pets and maybe a chicken.

I definitely understand the principle of wanting to be clean

inside of your house,

but I've never seen a disinfecting gun before,

so I was interested to try it out.

And we did find a listing for what looked like

one of these sprayer guns on the site SmartHome999.

Now though SmartHome999 is kind of a nice

and clean-looking website.

It does have some questionable internet retailer red flags.

You've got a lot of pretty big sales going on.

There are absolutely no reviews,

and this flame humidifier and aroma diffuser

is a pretty notoriously drop shipped product,

as I bought one from a TikTok ad like two years ago

and it's definitely not worth $40.

So although I would say that the items on this site

do not seem suspiciously cheap,

they may just be inflating the prices.

So though I would say to you, proceed with caution,

for the purposes of this video, it's full steam ahead.

So we went for the portable electric ULV sprayer

with blue light steam cleaner gun for 32.99.

Which apparently is supposed to come with

nano atomization disinfection technology

and six blue bacteriostatic lamps

which sounds pretty good.

So with that on the way, onto product number two.

Now for our next product,

we kind of had to get this smoking/bubbling produce cleaner.

This is an extremely popular product

across all of the videos that I've seen.

It's an almost inexplicable device

that you throw in with fruits and vegetables

and also live crabs and oysters,

I think to disinfect them as they soak.

This isn't necessarily a whole family of products,

though there are some smoking eyeglass cleaners we've seen,

but this specific product is so heavily featured

and it jumps out to viewers so much,

as you can see by these commenters

who are pretty mystified by it,

that it felt like we had to try it out.

It's also a good intersection of cleaning gadget

and cooking gadget.

You're still cleaning, but it's for food.

And there are a couple of different models of this item,

but we were drawn to the one

that looks like a Bluetooth speaker.

And we were able to find a listing

for what looked like it,

a fruit and vegetable cleaning machine

on SmartHome999 for 75.99.

Which is pretty expensive, especially for a gadget

that remains a complete mystery to me,

but we are gonna try and figure it out.

For now, I was happy to see

that it says it does not destroy food taste and nutrition,

which is always a good thing in my book.

So with this item added to the haul,

next up is the collapsible mini washing machine.

Now there are a lot of collapsible items

featured in these videos, besides shelves and racks

that kind of unfurl and stack.

There's also specifically a number

of collapsible mops and buckets and collapsible foot baths.

And a hugely popular item in these videos

is this collapsible mini washing machine.

They love this thing.

It's almost comedic, like as their mother-in-law

is ascending the stairs

or as their long-term crush is outside waiting for them,

they pull out this machine and start washing some socks.

But honestly, I do kind of see the appeal.

There are plenty of small apartments out there

that don't have laundry machines in-unit

and if this thing works, it could buy you some time

between laundromat visits.

So I'm gonna try it, and we did find a listing for one

on the website, Ulikefit.

Now compared to SmartHome999, Ulikefit's graphic design

and website layout is a little more AliExpress-ish,

a little less sleek and clean,

a little more throwing everything at you.

It does also have a wide sweeping super sale

across the entire website, which is a little questionable,

and a variation on the fake fire humidifier for sale.

This is a volcano humidifier, which is a red flag for me.

So once again, I'd proceed with caution.

But for us, we're diving right in.

So we picked up the portable foldable washing machine

with spin dryer automatic mini

underwear sock washing machine with Centrifuge for 65.99.

The reviews on this product do seem pretty positive

and they do also note

that you could take this on a business trip.

So I'm excited.

I was also hoping to pick up this crazy inflatable

drying bag, but after looking for a while,

we couldn't find it anywhere.

So our final product is a little bit of a wild card,

because it itself doesn't appear that often in these videos,

but there are a lot of mops, brooms, and mini vacuums

and a fair amount of smart or automatic products

like self-bagging trash cans, and self-stirring mugs.

So we felt like this one could be a good pick.

This is the smart window cleaner.

It is only touched upon very briefly,

so I couldn't get a huge sense of its capabilities

from what we saw, but I assume it's kind of like a Roomba,

but for your window.

And to be honest guys,

I just really wanted to try this thing.

I mean, it's pictured here being left to clean

this presumably high up window

with a beautiful view all on its own,

which seems like a big job.

So in order to find this product,

we actually did a reverse Google image search

using a screenshot from this video

and we're able to find what we think

is the same product on German Amazon.

This is the EZICLEAN Hobot 388 windscreen washer

and it is the most expensive item in this video

by quite a lot, at 400 euros.

And thankfully we were able to get it

despite what the screen recording implies.

So here's to hoping it doesn't fall off our window

and kill someone 'cause that would be bad.

So with that, we have our four TikTok

viral cleaning products,

or the closest things to them that we could find,

which I think altogether touch on

most of the types of products that you see in these videos.

Plus one smart window Roomba.

So the next time you see me, I'll have my haul.

All right, so many, many TikToks watched

and items reverse image searched later,

we have our haul, people.

We have four TikTok viral cleaning products here

to test, to try, and to see what's up.

There's also a secret one back here in case we have time.

If not, you'll never see it again.

It was cleaning slime and it exploded in the mail.

But the first product we're gonna be unboxing

is the Hobot window cleaner.

Now, as you guys remember,

this was our most expensive item by far.

- [Tyler] Oh damn!

- Oh, this bodes well.

And also our largest and heaviest package that arrived.

The electronics test, heavy equals quality.

And even though we ordered it via German Amazon,

it only took about two weeks to get to us.

Oh, oh, that's pretty sizable. This is as big as my head.

Now the instructions that it came with

were completely in French.

All right, we've got some Google Translate happening.

Let's see if we can understand these instructions.

For windows without a balcony,

a warning zone must be provided on the floor

to prevent people from approaching it.

Oh yeah, they do think it's dangerous.

Minus the potential peril to passerby.

It seems that you operate the Hobot through an app

and you do have to charge it for about 24 hours

before it's ready to go.

So I guess we're gonna have to wait for a while

before we can see how smart it truly is.

Is it more window Roomba or window Ken?

- [Tyler] I'm not sure if this has any thoughts.

- [Safiya] Yeah, no.

(both laughing)

- [Tyler] No thoughts.

- [Safiya] All looks, no thoughts.

- [Tyler] It's a himbo.

- It's a himbot.

So 24 hours later we were all charged up,

downloaded and ready to go.

And after breathing life into our Hobot.

(excited gasping)

Lift off.

- [Tyler] Does this fly like a drone?

- [Safiya] Yeah.

And also giving him a name.

What should we call him?

- Hobert. - Hobert?

Oh, that's cute, he's like Robert, but a ho.

(Safiya laughing)

We needed to design a test for him

to see what his cleaning prowess really was.

So we decided to dirty up our balcony window

with some washable paint to see what he could do.

- [Tyler] Okay, there you go.

- It looks like something I wanna get rid of.

I agree with that.

Now we do have a balcony,

which means we probably have less of a need

for a Hobot in the first place,

but it also means that we thankfully don't need

to worry about Hobot falling off the window

and dropping onto people.

That being said, there is a safety carabiner and cable,

so it does have a few precautionary features.

Then you just need to add some cleaning liquid

onto Hobot's pads before you place him on the window

and let him do his thing.

And he should suck himself to the door.

- [Tyler] He can suck himself.

- [Safiya] All right, let me go get my phone.

Now, right off the bat, I think Hobot passed the first test

of doing anything at all.

Is he going?

(excited cheering)

Hobert, my love. Oh my God, oh my God, he's walking!

- [Tyler] He's alive!

- [Safiya] As he did successfully cling to the window

and navigate up and down it by himself.

Oh my God, look at him!

From what we can tell, he isn't quite as smart as a Roomba

as it seems like he doesn't sense where the dirt is,

but rather has a set path that he wants to clean on.

And if he encounters the edge of the window,

he just goes back the other way.

Oh, I saw a squirt, he did a squirt, did you see that?

He's like a squid.

And even though the app does have

a directional control panel,

he doesn't totally listen to it,

but he does squirt on command.

Ready, spray! Spray!

Unfortunately on Hobot's first pass,

he did sort of smear a fair amount of the paint

around the window.

He thinks he's done, the answer is he's not.

So he gave him a fresh set of cleaning pads

to see if he could do better in a round two.

I may have over sprayed him

with the cleaning liquid here though,

as he seemed to have a hard time getting traction.

Come on, Hobert. Is he treading water right now?

And actually almost slipped.

Oh, oh, oh.

Which is probably one of the ways

this thing could be dangerous.

He is pretty sopping wet.

I didn't give him a shot in hell.

But after resetting him

with a normal amount of cleaning liquid,

Hobot did a pretty good job

cleaning up the paint smearing mess.

Oh, he's doing better already.

- [Tyler] He's zooming.

Oh yeah, he's in the top, he's in the top.

- [Safiya] Unfortunately there were a few smudges

near the edges of the window

and particularly one in the top-left corner

that Hobert seemed to want to ignore

when left to his own devices.

- [Tyler] Oh, he's not gonna get it.

- [Safiya] So I lifted him up and put him right next to it.

Here it goes, here it goes. - Come on!

- [Safiya] And then he finally got it.

(excited cheering)

Okay, pretty good. - Oh, I'll take it,

I'll take it. - I think it's pretty good.

Nobody puts Hobot in the corner except me

if I draw on the corner.

So is Hobot the smartest robot out there? No.

That'll do, bot that'll do.

But I do have to say that the window now looks really clean

even if it took a second pass.

So I'm decently happy with the Hobot.

Was it perfect? No.

But did it clean this door automatically? Mostly yes.

There is always the worry

that he's smarter than he's letting on.

- [Tyler] Oh shit, he's trying to open the door!

- [Safiya] He's trying to get in.

- [Tyler] He's like a velociraptor!

- [Safiya] But we'll just have to watch out for that.

All right, so next up I have the ULV sprayer.

Now this was our first product from SmartHome999,

and it did only take about 10 days for it to get here,

but unfortunately for it and us...

I have to say right off the bat, it is a light package.

There were a few drop shipping-y red flags.

- [Tyler] That's never a good sign

when it's the cardboard box, the outline.

(both laughing)

- [Safiya] And there he is with absolutely no fanfare,

not a piece of tissue paper to be found.

There were no labels, no instructions,

nothing at all in there besides the product itself.

And a single universal charger.

- [Tyler] That is a bad sign.

- That's, yeah, that's the Wish signature.

It's like Zorro Z, right?

But the product did at least turn on,

just firing off some warning shots.

- [Tyler] Cleaning the Holo Taco.

- [Safiya] So that's one box already checked.

And now that it's on,

we can see if this thing is just a placebo light

that just looks cool

or if it actually does disinfect anything at all.

Because right now I'm not so sure.

Regardless of whether the answer is yes or no,

I will be spraying everything in this house.

And after filling the sprayer bottle up

with some distilled water, I was ready to roll.

I'm locked and loaded, baby.

- [Tyler] Oh! Did you spray me?

- [Safiya] And can confirm that the spraying function

does seem to work pretty well too.

Oh! Oh yeah, okay. It is spraying, my hand is wet.

I think from a little further away. It's a little finer.

But yeah, it's misting.

This is the maiden of the mist.

I am the maiden of the mist.

And just for good measure.

Hold on, before we do anything,

I did do like they do in the videos and hosed myself down.

This is how you do it, right? I'm clean!

It's wet over here.

- You're soaked. - It's wet over here.

The floor is wet.

And I did also spray Tyler in the face a couple of times.

(loud spraying)

Like that? - We're soaked.

- Although it turns out

that looking straight into the blue lights

is not really advised,

so maybe don't try spraying people in the face with it.

All right, let's do some tests.

Can confirm water erupts,

can confirm light is on.

The question is does that matter?

So in order to see if this thing did anything at all,

we decided to set up a Petri dish bacteria test

on a nearby door handle.

This is one that adjoins our parking garage.

So there are quite a few hands

that touch it regularly that could have germs on them.

Oh yeah, look at that curve.

People be touching this curve, man.

With the idea that we would create three Petri dishes.

One with a swab of the uncleansed door handle,

germed from normal daily use.

Then one with a swab from the door handle

after spraying it with our blue light sprayer.

What do you think?

- Pretty sprayed! - Pretty spray-sprayed.

This did obviously make the handle a bit wet,

so we had to wait for it to dry before swabbing it

and putting our specimen on the after dish.

Then we did one dish with a control swab

from the door handle after cleansing it with a Clorox wipe.

It's supposed to kill 99.9% of viruses and bacteria, people.

Which I feel like represents a pretty normal level

of household disinfecting.

And after swabbing all of our swabs

on our three Petri dishes,

we stuck them in a special incubator,

which is supposed to help grow whatever bacteria

has been collected on the Petri dishes

over the next five days.

Ta-da, it's just me and my tiny humidifying cabinet

just hanging out, growing mold.

So we can see roughly how much bacteria

was collected after each treatment.

Now how this ULV spraying machine

is actually supposed to work is kind of threefold.

First off, ULV refers to the ultra low volume fog

that the sprayer emits, which is a very fine mist

that is meant to be able to spread,

cover and disinfect every inch of a specific area.

Second, after looking into it a bit,

it does seem that people think that blue light

at certain wavelengths can kill bacteria.

And the third fold is where we may have messed up a bit,

because based on this part of the original listing

and the fact that these sprayers were sprayed

so liberally on people, on pets, on this chicken,

we assumed that the liquid inside was just water.

But after asking Tyler's mom

to help translate this text on the actual box itself

and finding a few similar products on the Western market,

it seems that they might want you to fill the bottle up

with some kind of disinfectant,

which would make this just a disinfectant sprayer,

which probably should work.

But surprisingly enough,

we were actually able to get a decent result

just using blue light and water.

I see a little something there,

and I see a lack of something there.

As you can see here are the before spray, after spray

and control swabs of our Petri dish test.

And we were able to replicate the results

on a different handle.

So it kind of seemed to work for us,

but it probably would work even better

with some disinfectant inside.

I probably would still lean towards

getting a more legit version, seeing how this one arrived.

And for my purposes, I'm gonna stick with water for now,

just so I can keep spraying Tyler in the face with it,

as long as he keeps his eyes closed.

All right, so next up I have the vegetable cleaner.

Now this fruit and vegetable cleaning machine

once again came from SmartHome999,

and took about two weeks to arrive.

Let me in. Ta-da.

It's the DL-001 purifier, people. Donlim.

And thankfully, right off the bat,

it felt much more substantial than the ULV sprayer.

The box was bigger with some serious branding on it.

It came with a whole set of instructions

and the device itself came out looking

almost exactly like what it looked like in the videos.