10 Of The Dodgiest Beauty Hacks On Pinterest

Who doesn’t love a beauty tip that saves you time and money?

Pinterest is full of handy hints and tips that claim all sorts of things, often using common household items in lieu of more expensive products. You might have a Pinterest board full of these that you want to get around to trying some day…if you can get past some of the WTFery that surrounds some of these ideas in the first place.

While some of these do work, others are useless at best and, at worse, a bit dangerous. In fact I have learned the hard way after trying a few of these in the past….

Here are some common Pinterest beauty hacks you’d be best off avoiding like the plague:

1. Use baking soda as a face scrub

This is a really bad idea – baking soda is terrible for your skin. The natural pH balance of your skin is around a 5, which helps to maintain the acid mantle – a barrier that protects your skin. The pH of baking soda is high – around 8.3. So when you apply it to your skin, you upset the balance of the acid mantle and disrupt your skin’s natural flora, bacteria and oil production.

2. DIY your own glow-in-the-dark nail polish with glow sticks

This Pinterest hack involves breaking open a glow stick and then mixing it together with a clear topcoat to manufacture your very own glow-in-the-dark nail polish. That sounds pretty cool, right? Glow sticks actually aren’t meant to be opened up. The chemicals aren’t supposed to come into contact with your skin and can cause irritations such as dermatitis and even chemical burns.

3. Homemade Mascara using Oreo’s

I actually thought this was a joke… a satire or parody by someone taking the piss, but they are actually for real. It involves grinding up Oreo biscuits and mixing them with rubbing alcohol to make your own mascara.

There’s so many reasons this isn’t a good idea. You really shouldn’t put stuff in or around your eyes that isn’t safe to apply there.

4. Soaking nails in lemon juice to promote growth

Exposing your nails to lemon juice like this actually just dries them out. Instead of boosting them and getting them to grow, they’ll just end up brittle.

5. Use a Magic Eraser to fix your self-tan

Sometimes, if you botch your self tan you can end up with lots of dark streaks. A Pinterest hack says you can fix this by using a Magic Eraser – you know, the little white foam block thingo that you use to remove your kids’ artwork from the walls. The sponge is actually way too abrasive to use on human skin.

6. Heating your Eyelash Curler with a Blow Dryer

What could possibly go wrong, apart from ending up with burns on your eyelids, eyeballs or even burning your eyelashes off completely?

7. Soak your feet in Listerine to remove dead skin

This Pinterest hack does the rounds all the time – you’re supposed to mix Listerine, vinegar and warm water together, soak your feet in it and the dead skin will magically just “wipe off”. You might be tempted to try this to get your feet ready for sandals weather… and then be bitterly disappointed when all you’ve actually done is stain your feet blue or green, depending on the Listerine you used.

8. Use permanent marker instead of liquid eyeliner

This one was supposedly made popular by a claim from Taylor Swift that she has used a Sharpie as an eyeliner. It’s not a good idea… your eyes are very sensitive and even the lightest of fumes from a permanent marker can irritate your eyes.

9. Cat Litter Face Mask

If it’s good enough for your cat’s butt, it’s good enough for your face? Yeah, nah. According to this particular hack, cat litter that contains bentonite clay can be turned into a face mask that’s much cheaper than the clay face masks you buy with dermatological grade clay in them. The problem with this is that there’s other stuff in the cat litter, it isn’t just pure clay. Some brands contain aluminium silicate, for example, which is an ingredient used to make glass and in housing insulation and is a known neurotoxin for humans.

10. Use Crusty Gunk from top of a Foundation Bottle as Concealer

This beauty hack advises using the gunky crusty goo that often collects at the top of your foundation bottle as a replacement when you run out of concealer. Unfortunately, we often keep foundation way past its use-by date and the chunky stuff up the top is probably full of bacteria.