TikTok's Popular Toilet 'Cleaning' Trend Is A Recipe For Disaster

These days, social media cleaning hacks are all the rage as more and more people try out things they see others doing online in hopes of creating a cleaner home. Sometimes, we want to get our houses groomed faster, smarter, or simply better and resort to some questionable means to do so. Tidying up your toilet should be a straightforward process, but with all of these "tips" coming from online content creators, it can get pretty complicated and even dangerous. 

A popular TikTok cleaning trend involves throwing in all your favorite powder and liquid products without pausing to verify if they're compatible or not. This trend is dubbed "toilet overload" and is a recipe for disaster. There are a lot of TikTok cleaning hacks that aren't worth the hype, and this is certainly one of them especially considering bleach, which is often a key part of this process, shouldn't be mixed with other products in the first place. 

TikTok creator @cleaningtobe mixed a number of cleaners including Ajax, Clorox, and Comet before dousing them in a bottle of Mr. Clean. Not only is this unnecessary and wasteful but it may even create much bigger problems down the line, especially with your pipes, which are obviously going to be harder to fix than by just pouring a load of products down there. Worse still, following this wild cleaning trend can cause major health issues.

Because of how often we clean our toilets with different products, we may start to see them as regular solutions and powders instead of chemicals with active ingredients. As such, more people are stacking them up like they do in the TikTok trend without knowing or caring about the health implications. Mixing bleach-based substances with other chemicals is a huge risk that often leads to respiratory issues. Mixing bleach and vinegar, for instance, releases toxic chlorine gas, which affects your breathing and throat. Bleach and ammonia, meanwhile, produce chloramine, which also affects breathing and can cause chest pain.

Healthcare expert and co-medical director at the National Capital Poison Center Kelly Johnson-Arbor revealed to Good Housekeeping that this is one of the main sources of calls and complaints that the center receives every day. "Inhalation of either of these can cause coughing, irritation of the nose and throat, and trouble breathing," Johnson-Arbor stated. "For those with asthma, COPD or lung disease, serious respiratory problems can occur and can even result in death." 

Always check your product labels to know what not to mix them with and keep in mind that bathrooms aren't as well-ventilated as other rooms in your house. Compounding cleaning solutions won't make your toilet any cleaner. If it's stained so much that a regular product and a good scrub won't fix it, choose something specialized instead of mixing more than one.