The Nifty Beauty Tool TikTok Swears By For A Seamless Paint Job

Adding a fresh coat of paint to your walls, trim, or furniture can be a great way to give your space a much-needed upgrade. However, it can also be a rather tedious task. Fortunately, there's one DIY paint hack that promises to cut down on both the time and effort it takes to get this job done. On top of that, you might end up with a result that is better than you would have gotten if you had used a traditional method. So what is this handy hack? A TikTok user who goes by @thegrayhome shows them painting the railing of a staircase. However, instead of using a paintbrush, Gray uses a tanning mitt in an unexpected but surprisingly effective way.

If you've never used a tanning mitt then you should know that it's an oversized item made of a soft material that is meant to help you apply self-tanner without getting the product all over your hand. Big enough to cover a relatively large area in one pass, it can also help you achieve a nice and even coat of paint. You just want to make sure that you're using it correctly so that the final results are what you're looking for.

When @thegrayhome, posted her painting hack video on TikTok, it racked up over 3.9 million views as well as more than 97 thousand likes. You'll understand why when you see how well Gray's trick works — when she uses it to paint her staircase railing, she ends up with seriously impressive results. Gray starts by applying black paint to a white railing with a paintbrush, which leaves a streaky, uneven coat. Then she pulls out the tanning mitt and slips it on after putting on a thin rubber glove to make sure that the paint doesn't soak through onto her skin. 

After putting a bit of paint on the mitt, she simply runs it over the railing in a smooth motion. She moves it up and down a few times to fully cover each area as the text overlay on the video tells viewers: "...This gives the most perfect finish and is done in half the time." One person wrote in the comments, "Omg thank you so much [for] this, I have painted mine black and had to sand over and over," obviously thrilled to have come across Gray's video. Others were just as grateful and impressed with another person wondering if this hack could be used in a slightly different way, writing, "Do you think this works on walls?!"