Simple 50-cent office supply that removes scratches on your iPhone in seconds

No matter the make, model or price point, your iPhone is a serious investment. 

A new or refurbished iPhone can costing anywhere from a few hundred to well over a thousand dollars — and that’s before the monthly cell fees. 

While scratches are inevitable with a smart phone that sees daily use like a 21st Century Swiss Army Knife, there are cost effective ways to restore your iPhone’s surfaces to the sleek, minimalist heights of Apple’s modernist design. 

The best is a quick hack that comes direct from the old school fixes used by professional photographers to get rid of a troublesome lens scratch on the fly: all you need is a clean, new, soft white rubber eraser. 

A 12-pack of these simple erasers will cost you about $5.85 right now on Amazon, meaning that for a cost as low as 50 cents you could make a scuffed up iPhone look good as new.

As with a camera lens, your first step will be to clean the surfaces thoroughly with a microfiber cloth to clear out any dirt or debris that would interfere with this hack.

With that done, very gently rub the eraser first along the direction of the scratch, left to right, for about 30-to-60 seconds. Then, rub the eraser up and down the scratched area for 30-to-60 seconds.

While you can also use the kind of eraser that’s found on the end of a pencil, care must be taken to avoid using an old eraser that is coarse or abrasive. Otherwise, you will risk producing more scratches than you buff out. 

As you repeat the process several times, you’ll notice the eraser has gently filled-in the scratch. But, as CNET warned during its review of this and other methods, ‘Don’t press down too hard, though!’

If the eraser technique doesn’t work for you, or you’re in a rush with only other items on hand, there are two other options you could try: toothpaste or certain of car-buffing products. 

For toothpaste, note that it has to be true paste, not one of the myriad colorful translucent gels toothpastes. As the DailyMail.com illustrated years ago, If a phone has a single crack, one of the easiest ways to fix it temporarily is to smooth over the line with white toothpaste to make it disappear. 

CNET’s Alina Bradford found that this technique was less effective on screens compared to cases, but even more effective on plastic iPhone cases like OtterBox.

As for car products, both car waxes and headlight lens creams have shown promise, given that they are meant to work on the same kinds of heavily engineered, durable-but-lightweight materials.

‘I gave Mother’s PowerPlastic 4Lights headlight cream a try,’ Bradford said. ‘It made the scratches fade significantly, and l liked the shine it gave my screen.’