What to Clean and What Not to Clean With Lemon

Yes, you can clean your microwave with lemon, certain clothing, too, but you probably should not be using it for some of the popular hacks on TikTok

Smelly garbage disposal? Stained cutting board? Yellow armpit stains on your favorite white T-shirt? Lemons to the rescue! I’m infatuated with the idea that according to TikTok influencers and popular home décor publications, I could be not only eating and drinking but also cleaning with my favorite, vibrantly scented fruit.

But I’m also skeptical that anything could clean better than the stuff specially formulated to get rid of stains, grime, and bacteria, so I chatted with Consumer Reports’ experts and a microbiologist about just how much one can rely on lemons to clean various spots around the house.

In theory, there are a few things about lemons and lemon juice that make them decent for including in your cleaning routine. Lemon juice, like vinegar, is mildly acidic. Acids can be used as stain removers by adding a charge to a stain’s molecules, which then become attracted to the charges in water molecules. This gives the stains a light tug that loosens them enough to be rinsed away in water. (You can use vinegar as part of a process to remove stains from carpets, though proceed with care.)

Citric acid, the acid in lemons and other citrus fruits, is a reducing agent, which means it has a few tricks up its sleeve that vinegar doesn’t. Reducing agents can unravel proteins, like those found in viruses.

Finally, citric acid acts as a chelating agent, a substance that seizes magnesium and calcium in hard water that forms hard water buildup, like the limescale you’ll find on your shower tiles. More on this later.

That’s all in theory. How good is lemon juice at actually doing this stuff?

Anyone who’s ever put lemon juice in their hair in the hopes that the sun will lighten it to a summery blonde is familiar with the idea of lemons as a form of mild bleach, at least ideally. In reality, lemon juice can remove some stains—within reason.

“Lemon juice is a mild bleaching agent, and the acidity may help remove the combination that traditional antiperspirants and sweat create on white T-shirts,” says Rich Handel, a senior test project leader at Consumer Reports. “It also may work on white socks. It should not be used on anything that has colors.” Use it only on cotton, he says, and never on delicates.

What about putting it in the washing machine, as recommended by this TikTok? “I’d skip that,” says Rich. Don’t do it with vinegar, either. Read more about effective stain removal here. If you have a stain that seems too serious for lemon juice, check out Consumer Reports’ top-rated stain removers.

Lemons smell delicious, fresh—and clean. People historically associate lemons with cleanliness; one study, published in 2005, even found that being unconsciously exposed to lemon-scented all-purpose cleaner compels people to keep their space clean. Their scent has a long historical presence, as well; a court physician in 12th century Egypt wrote in his book “A Treatise of the Dietetic Properties of the Lemon” that lemon peel freshened the breath (including the smell of one’s burp). The world’s first eau de cologne, created by the Italian perfumer Giovanni Maria Farina in the early 18th century in Cologne, Germany, consisted of bergamot and lemon essences. Mozart, Napoleon, Oscar Wilde, and Queen Victoria all wore it.

Apart from purchasing lemon-scented eau de cologne, how can you scent your home with lemon? One method approved by Consumer Reports is by using chopped-up lemons in your garbage disposal to freshen it up. Once a week, with the faucet and machine turned off, throw six ice cubes, a few thin slices of lemon, a tablespoon of baking soda, and a teaspoon of bleach down your garbage disposal. After tossing in another six ice cubes, turn on the disposal (faucet off) until the grinding stops. Flush it with cold water for 30 seconds and enjoy a squeaky-clean garbage disposal. Food can settle in the chamber and rot, hence the smell, so maintain your garbage disposal by running cold water before, during, and for 7 seconds after use.

The aforementioned TikTok also recommends placing lemon peels in a bowl in your fridge to “absorb odors,” but there are better methods for this, according to Larry Ciufo, senior test project leader at Consumer Reports. “I would use baking soda over lemon peels because the peels can get moldy,” he says. Perhaps if you live on a lemon orchard, your surplus is enough that it’s worth it to cycle through a new bowl of lemon peels in your fridge daily, but for the rest of us, baking soda is a better bet.

Stinky microwave? Lemon juice can help. A Consumer Reports-approved method of cleaning your microwave involves nuking a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice in hot water for a couple of minutes to get the oven steamy. Wipe it down and say goodbye to a microwave that smells like two-day-old leftover bolognese. Don’t expect the lemon juice to take any sanitizing action on the microwave, though. “It is possible that the steam generated—if the inside gets hot long enough—would ‘sanitize’ (make clean and hygienic; disinfect) with or without the lemon juice,” says James E. Rogers, PhD, director of food safety research and testing at Consumer Reports. “And probably help clean due to loosening baked-on food in the microwave more than anything.”

You can use lemon juice to clean surfaces in your kitchen—sort of. If you’re looking to clean up countertops or floor tiles, though, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere. “Lemon juice has shown some anti-bacterial properties, and there are scientific papers that have studied this. However, the papers that I reviewed were performed in the laboratory and may not transfer to a consumer’s kitchen, where there are so many variables,” says Rogers. “I would stick with diluted bleach, commercial cleaners, or just plain soap and warm water to clean up before and after food prep, followed by a good rinse with warm water. That is what I do.”

Some research bears this out; a 1994 study compared the performance of “alternative cleaners,” including vinegar, lemon juice, ammonia, and borax, with commercial cleaners. No alternative cleaner was as successful as commercial cleaners at removing soil or microbes from laminate tiles.

What lemon is good for? Cutting boards. TeakHaus, a top cutting board brand from our evaluations, recommends lemon juice as a stain remover and deodorizer—and, anecdotally speaking, lemon juice works well at removing garlic and onion odors from my Boos Block cutting board (another CR fave). TeakHaus suggests rubbing a cut lemon over the cutting board, sprinkling it with baking soda or kosher salt, and letting it sit for a few hours before scraping it off with a spatula for maximum deodorizing. Be sure to wash, dry, and oil the board after such an intensive process. Boos Block says that 2 to 3 minutes of sitting, rather than hours, works fine.

Hard water is a real pain in the butt: It appears as buildup on dishes fresh out of the dishwasher, it clogs faucets, it makes clothes rough and scratchy. Lemon juice, to a certain extent anyway, can help.

“Citric acid (in lemon juice and other citrus juices) is a very good chelating agent (that is, it’s good at grabbing cations),” a.k.a. positively charged ions, says Eric Beckman, PhD, a professor of engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. “In cleaning, this means that it’s good at removing certain types of deposits left by hard water (mostly calcium and magnesium)—basically limescale.”

This doesn’t mean you should toss a used lemon in your dishwasher, despite what folks on TikTok might have you believe. For cleaning limescale in the dishwasher, “I would use a dishwasher cleaner that is made for that,” Larry says. A half-lemon isn’t going to have enough descaling power to counteract the effects of hard water in your dishwasher.

Chances are, you’ll have spring cleaning tasks that lemons alone can’t tackle. We have some tips for making quick work of your kitchen, bathrooms, living room, laundry room, and bedrooms.

Angela Lashbrook

Angela Lashbrook is a multimedia content creator at Consumer Reports. She has been with CR since 2021 and covers a wide range of topics, but she is particularly interested in anything health- or parenting-related. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and her dog, a Libra named Gordo.