I read online somewhere (probably found it through Pinterest!) that you can shine your car’s headlights with toothpaste.  Ours were pretty old and dingy, so I decided to give it a try.  I grabbed a tube of regular paste-style toothpaste (not gel) and a rag, and headed out to the carport.  Because I wanted to see if it was making a difference I started out by just doing half of one headlight.  I rubbed it all over – didn’t really even scrub it much just yet – and then rinsed it off to take a look.

This is what it looks like with the water still running down:

And from a slightly different angle:

Looks to me like it’s working!

So I moved on to doing the whole headlight.  This time I did give it a bit of a scrub, but nothing terribly strenuous.  Then I rinsed it of and stepped back to take a look.  It is, admittedly, a bit hard to get a picture, but you can see that my formerly dingy headlight lens is definitely reflecting the sunlight now!

Again, it’s a little hard to compare because one side of the car is toward the sunlight and the other isn’t, but see how much clearer/whiter the near headlight is, compared to the yellowed look of the one on the far side?

I consider this a success!  (And it’s way more eco-friendly and people-friendly than that horrible, scary stuff they sell at the auto parts store for cleaning/polishing headlights.)

So just in time for Christmas travels, get your headlights good and shiny!