I see a lot of trends on #cleantok—a hashtag with a whopping 5.2 million tagged videos on TikTok—and a good majority of them are junk. Lots of people recommend combining vinegar with baking soda to create a scouring paste, for example, but adding an acid to a base just neutralizes the solution, so it negates the benefits of both. Wirecutter also tested the ultra-viral cleaning paste The Pink Stuff and found that it wasn’t the miracle worker that everyone on social media claimed it to be.
Something that caught my eye recently was the recommendation to dust walls and ceilings with a large, extendable lint roller (as seen in this bathroom-cleaning video). My knee jerk was to lump this idea into the “overconsumption” bucket and write it off as unnecessary, but then I got to thinking: Should I be lint-rolling my walls?
Usually if I notice dust on my walls, I’ll do a few passes with a damp microfiber cloth. In my experience, this has worked just fine, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m not often getting up on a stepladder to dust the upper half of my walls or ceilings. I reserve that special task for right before I want to repaint the walls.
However, I am in a near-constant battle with the dust and lint in my apartment, due to an always-shedding dog, equally shed-prone linen sheets, and whatever particulate horrors make their way in through the open windows. I also can’t deny how deeply satisfying it would be to simply roll the dust off surfaces in my home and just toss the used sheet in the trash. So I decided to give lint-rolling a try—and I was sorely disappointed.
Top pick
I tried “dusting” my walls with a sticky lint roller, but microfiber cloths are more effective at trapping dust, hair, and more.
These are the most absorbent and affordable microfiber cloths we tested, and they’re durable, too.
Instead of impulse-buying an extend-o lint roller, I started with our pick (which I conveniently already own): the Scotch-Brite Lint Roller. Although it makes quick work of removing stubborn, short dog fur from my sweaters, it did next to nothing to pick up dust on my walls.
I tried this “trick” in the two dustiest rooms in my home: the bathroom and the bedroom. The bathroom, which doubles as a laundry room, is prone to a thin layer of dust on the walls thanks to flyaway lint from the dryer, toilet paper debris, and, of course, plenty of skin cells and hair. It’s easy to see when dust piles up, too, because the walls are painted with a satin finish that reflects light from the considerably bright vanity. A few rolls back and forth over the wall with a clean lint-roller sheet showed no real difference in dust levels, and there was hardly anything to see on the sticky paper.
Next, I tried lint-rolling several walls in the bedroom with another fresh sheet. The bedroom remains constantly dusty due to the bedding lint, dog fur, and dander that get trapped in the fibers of the wall-to-wall carpeting. Even though I regularly vacuum and dust, the bedroom accumulates dust quicker than other rooms. Again, no results to speak of when I lint-rolled the walls.
I also found it difficult to maneuver the lint roller across the wall, as both the walls and the roller are not completely smooth, so the paper had a tendency to stick in certain places but miss spots in others. Perhaps this function would be improved with the aforementioned extend-o roller, but I’m skeptical that it would make much of a difference (and I don’t want to spend the money to find out), as it’s much the same tool with a different handle.
For comparison, I wiped all the tested sections of the walls with my usual method, a damp microfiber cloth. Although I didn’t come away with more dust than was already visible, this method was certainly more effective at picking up and trapping dust than lint-rolling. Not to mention, the lint roller’s sheets are made from single-use plastic, and my microfiber cloths can be washed and reused for years.
If you’re unable to reach tall portions of the wall and don’t want to get up on a ladder, you can instead use any cleaning tool you have on hand with a telescopic pole, such as a microfiber duster or even a Swiffer sweeper. Dampening the fibers of the pad or cloth with a bit of water is always my go-to hack because it helps clump up dust and prevents it from falling off my chosen cleaning tool or redistributing back onto surfaces.
Plus, if you’re like me and looking to cut down on dust in your home as a whole, you’re much better off doing some preventive maintenance, such as frequently vacuuming floors, running an air purifier, periodically cleaning or changing air filters, regularly bathing and brushing pets, and laundering linens weekly.
I’ll admit that the morbidly curious part of me was hoping that I’d be horrified by how much dust was on my walls, picked up with ease by the lint roller with obvious results right there on the paper. But alas, my initial hunch was correct: We really do not need to be lint-rolling our walls.
Even the dustiest rooms in my home don’t collect that much dust on the walls, and if they do, I’ll continue reaching for a trusty microfiber cloth for a quick wipe-down.
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.
