The Best Household Items For Cleaning Up Sticker Gunk

The Best Household Items For Cleaning Up Sticker Gunk


We’ve encountere a lot of different MacGyver solutions for sticker gunk over the years. We took five of the most common suggestions and tried them out: rubbing alcohol, WD-40, lighter fluid, cooking oil and Goo Gone to find out what worked best. Check out the video to see them all in action.

Photo by M-PeX
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Surprisingly, the rubbing alcohol was far and away the best of the options we tried. It gets rid of that gunk blazingly fast and dries up quickly, leaving your surface smooth and shiny. (Other types of alcohol, like vodka, should work pretty well too.)

The lighter fluid was the worst, although we expect it’s because Ronsonol lighter fluid — the most commonly recommended — no longer contains naphtha, the solvent that made it so effective (Update: Ronsonol indeed no longer contains naphtha, but we also got the wrong kind of lighter fuel, which is the real source of the problem). Goo Gone worked well, but left behind some oily residue that made it not quite as nice as the rubbing alcohol.

All except the lighter fluid worked, so any of them should do the trick if you’re caught in a bind. But we’d choose the alcohol every time if we had a choice.


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