How to Clean Cloudy Glasses

Is your cupboard full of cloudy glasses?! Ours sure is. Don’t live with them like that anymore — after reading this post, you’ll know how to clean cloudy drinking glasses and restore them to their former glory.

Some people can live without a dishwasher.

I am not one of those people. In our first apartment, we didn’t have a dish washer. I thought it would be fine, but as the dishes piled up, I found myself dreading doing it all by hand. Because of that, I probably didn’t always take care of the dishes as well as I could have, which resulted in lots of cloudy drinking glasses.

In our third apartment, we didn’t have a dishwasher, again, but we did have a portable dishwasher we bought. It unfortunately wasn’t that great and our glasses got even worse. So now, we have a fantastic collection of foggy drinking glasses. Part of me just wants to buy a new set, because I feel so embarrassed when we have company over. Fortunately, the other side of me — aka, the thriftier side of me — doesn’t want to pay money for glasses. So, I decided to see how I could remove the fogginess from them in an attempt to restore them to their former glory.

I read about a bunch of different techniques, many of which were rather interesting. Some involved using acetone (even the thought of that smell is making my head spin!), others plain, white toothpaste. However, the one that seemed the most do-able and easy involved white vinegar and a rag.

Sadly, we aren’t at our home in Utah, so I didn’t get to try this out on my drinking glasses (but believe me, I will when I am home.) And, my mom doesn’t have any cloudy drinking glasses — not one! So Forrest and I went and bought a couple of glasses at Goodwill (they literally had two that fit the bill) to see if this would work.

There’s two ways you can use vinegar to clean cloudy drinking glasses:

Pour about two tablespoons of vinegar per cup being washed into a small bowl.

Using a clean cloth, gently wash the glass (inside and out) with the vinegar.

This is great if you only have one or two glasses to clean. However, if you are like me, you’ll want to try this next method. Using a 1:1 ratio of vinegar and water, fill a tub or sink up. Place all the glasses in the mixture and let them sit for about ten minutes.

Either method you use, I recommend sending the glasses through a cycle in the dishwasher or hand wash them with hot, soapy water using a good dishwasher detergent.