Give your phone a heavy-duty clean with these UV cleaners

Your phone may or may not be dirtier than a toilet seat right now, but luckily you can fix that with an ultraviolet phone sanitizer. After all, our phones pick up a whole heap of bacteria, germs, and other nastiness when we set them down throughout our days. Ultraviolet phone sanitizers are nifty little devices, and while they can cost a pretty penny, they’re 110% worth the investment if they can keep you from getting sick, now more than ever.

What matters in an ultraviolet phone sanitizer?

There are a wide variety of ultraviolet phone cleaners out there: tent/box models, tanning salon-like clamshells, and wands. We’re staying away from wands for three reasons:

• Too easy to hurt yourself: UV-C can seriously damage your eyes in seconds and can also damage your skin, so enclosed sanitizers are safer for a home environment where kids might try to mess with something that looks like a “magic wand”.
• Easier to mess up: Wands rely on you to hold the wand over your phone at the right angle for the right amount of time, and humans are prone to skipping steps and speeding up their counts.
• Expensive: UV-C wands that are actually effective are more expensive to come by right now — and the good ones are sold out.

Skip the wands and go enclosed! The best ultraviolet phone sanitizer is the PhoneSoap 3, especially now that the company has finally recovered from the massive backorders placed at the start of the pandemic. If you need something more travel-friendly, I recommend grabbing the HoMedics UV-Clean Phone Sanitizer, which works quicker than the PhoneSoap and is more readily available. Unfortunately, you’ll need to flip your phone to clean each side of it. Actually, it takes more than just flipping it once to get your phone completely clean.

How to properly clean your phone with UV-C

These all might be ultraviolet phone sanitizers, but unless your sanitizer has a highly reflective interior like the PhoneSoap, you need to do more than stick your phone inside and walk away. Here’s how to ensure you completely and utterly eliminate the germs on your phone:

1. If your phone is wearing a case, take the case off.
2. Run the case through the ultraviolet phone sanitizer once face up.
3. Take the case out and run the ultraviolet phone sanitizer empty to eliminate any germs that are transferred from the back of your case to the bottom of the sanitizer bay.
4. Run the case through the ultraviolet phone sanitizer again face down.
5. Take the case out and run the ultraviolet phone sanitizer empty to eliminate any germs that are transferred from the front of your case to the bottom of the sanitizer bay.
6. Run your phone through the ultraviolet phone sanitizer once face up.
7. Take the phone out and run the ultraviolet phone sanitizer empty to eliminate any germs that are transferred from the back of your phone to the bottom of the sanitizer bay.
8. Run the case through the ultraviolet phone sanitizer again face down.
9. Take the case out and run the ultraviolet phone sanitizer empty to eliminate any remaining germs so they don’t incubate in your dark, empty sanitizer until your next cleaning cycle.
10. Put your case back on your phone.