My dental hygienist kindly offered me this tip at my last cleaning: to keep teeth whiter between visits, brush once a month with a mixture of baking soda (tsp) and hydrogen peroxide (1 cap full). These compounds when mixed together remove coffee and tea stains from teeth naturally. Turns out baking soda comes from a mixture of calcium carbonate (shells or limestone) and sodium chloride (good ‘ole table salt). So I’ve been following her advice, and it works. My teeth are whiter for pennies. (Disclaimer: this is not medical advice.)

Happy with my whiter teeth, I wanted to take a nice hot bath after a long day of moving into a new house, but the bathtub was severely stained. It looked like about five years of thick yellowish soap scum. Gross. When I leaned in close to see how bad it was, I noticed some scratch marks on the fiberglass surround from where previous tenants had scrubbed ineffectively, possibly with a Brillo pad, and gave up. I wondered if the baking soda hydrogen peroxide mix would clean these stains, like it had cleaned my teeth.

With nothing to lose but yucky scum, I mixed up a bowl full of the mix and spread it on thick. After letting the mix stand and work for half an hour, I came back with a regular kitchen sponge to investigate the results. It took a little elbow scrubbing power, particularly in the corners, but all those gross stains came off. The tub surround was about 10 shades lighter, even better than the results on my teeth.

Best part is that I didn’t wash any toxic chemicals down the drain. Here in Hawaii, a lot of what goes down the drain eventually finds its way to the ocean and kills fish. Even though I wanted a hot bath in a clean tub, I didn’t want to kill a living reef to do it. A bonus suprise was that my hands and nails were fine afterward, no rashes or burns like with standard store cleaners.