Best Cleaning Wipes to Tackle Your Quick and Easy Household Tasks
Keep a roll of our favorite wipes on every floor of your home and you’ll find that cleaning is that much easier
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I keep a pack of multipurpose wipes near my desk because I don’t particularly want or need to do a full-fledged clean when it’s merely looking a bit dusty or dull. Cleaning wipes are best for these types of jobs: quick, minimal tasks like cleaning your desk, your steering wheel, or, in my case, my kid’s high chair (for, you know, the light-wear days).
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- Cleaning Wipes We Evaluated: Aunt Fannie's Biom Method The Pink Stuff Tub O'Towels How We Evaluated
These are the wipes I now keep by my desk. They’re thick and sizable enough to manage wiping down my desk surface, computer stand, and filing cabinet. They’re on the drier side, so they leave fewer streaks than wetter wipes and allow you to go about your business rather than having to wait around for your surfaces to dry. They aced all three of my tests, including wiping up sriracha and olive oil from my kitchen counters and chunky jam from my gas stovetop.
The Tub O’Towels wipes are big enough—10 inches by 12 inches!—to use twice. I found that most wipes aren’t big or tough enough for heavy-duty cleaning, but not so with these. I keep them in my kitchen for quickly wiping my quartz countertops, the dining table, and my baby’s highchair. The bits of dried-up sweet potato stuck to the highchair tray won’t budge with any wipes, including these, but drops of milk, hot sauce, or rice are no match for a Tub O’Towels wipe. I also used a wipe to get some honey off the top of my hand, which the wipe did well with plenty of wipe left to spare. I carefully folded over the area with honey and wiped down the dining table with the rest.
These wipes are easy to remove from the tub, although I found that I had better success if I used a finger to apply pressure and more easily tear the wipes from each other.
Biom wipes work a bit differently than the rest of the batch we tested. They’re sold in refill packs of three or six (180 to 360 wipes total) which you insert into an elegant wipes dispenser that’s sold separately (and which we tried). The dispenser is made from plastic that looks and feels sturdy, and has a magnetic closure that shuts with a satisfying snap. The dispenser comes in multiple colors, including a faded rose (dusty pink), hunter green, sea foam (pale minty blue), and black.
I appreciated that these wipes had a mild citrusy scent, and Biom offers fragrance-free wipes, too. Their performance falls right in the middle: I was able to wipe up an entire strip of sriracha but had no wipe to spare. I had better luck wiping up oil and had no problem using it to get a bit of honey off my hand. They did leave some streaks on my countertop, so these aren’t the wipes you’ll want to use regularly on dark-colored counters.
Biom wipes are plant-based and biodegradable. The company claims that its refill system makes cleaning “more sustainable,” though it’s worth noting that its refill packs come in plastic packaging, similar to the packaging used for The Pink Stuff wipes, below.
Despite being made with the typically unpleasant-smelling vinegar, these biodegradable wipes had a light, unoffensive fragrance with only a hint of vinegar odor. That said, their cleaning capabilities were limited. They left behind quite a bit of soapy residue—almost as if I’d been using actual soap on my countertops—and took several minutes to dry and created soapy streaks. I had to go over the oil twice to wipe it up, and I wasn’t able to pick up all the jam from my stovetop.
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Perhaps I shouldn’t have been astonished, and yet: These are truly, astonishingly, pink. As someone who likes pink, wears a fair amount of it, and has even had pink hair, this might be a bit too pink. Maybe this is because pink isn’t a color often associated with cleaning (that’s typically left to white or, occasionally, blue). So to open the packet and find a stack of wipes that are so pink they’re nearly magenta was a bit of a shock.
Does it matter? Not really. They smell pink, too—the scent, according to the package, is “fresh fruity”—but it’s more rotten fruit than fresh, like guava that’s been sitting too long in the sun, or rather the idea of guava, because the smell is artificial.
What about how it cleans? It’s … fine. The wipes themselves are thin and quite dry yet somehow manage to leave a soapy, streaky residue anyway. I was able to wipe sriracha off my counter without any trouble, but the wipes were too puny to manage the jam on my stove; I had to use two.
These wipes come in packets rather than a hard plastic container. They’re designed well and don’t dry out when properly sealed.
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How We Evaluated the Wipes
I began evaluating these wipes as soon as I opened them, assessing how easy—or difficult—it was to set up each tube and fish out a wipe. I also evaluated the smell, which should be pleasant but not overpowering.
I conducted three tests in my home to see how well each wipe performed in different cleaning situations. I used a wipe to clean up:
• A squirt of sriracha on my kitchen counter
• A heaping half-teaspoon of chunky jam on my gas stovetop
• And a squeeze of canola oil on my kitchen counter
To see how each of the skin-safe wipes (Biom and Tub O’Towels) performed on my hands, I applied about one-quarter teaspoon of honey to the top of my hand and attempted to clean it off with a wipe.
I measured each wipe. Bigger wipes really do tend to perform better.
I also used the wipes more casually in my day-to-day life, which quickly revealed which ones were the most effective and which would languish in my basement until I ran out of the others.
A note for surface safety: Although I used these wipes on my quartz countertops, you may want to be careful if you have granite, marble, butcher block, or other natural countertops because some materials require specific cleaners to protect their longevity. This includes wooden tables, like the dining table that I used in my test (a very old, very tired table that will be getting replaced in the next couple of months).
A note for folks with sensitive skin and eczema: According to the National Eczema Association (NEA), while keeping areas clean is good for people with eczema—it eliminates allergens that can provoke eczema flares—the harshness of the ingredients in many cleaning products can cause their own problems. When you clean, wearing long sleeves in breathable fabrics can help, as can wearing gloves. The NEA recommends clipping the ends of the gloves for more dexterity if you don’t tend to break out on the tips of your fingers.
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