8 Surprising Uses for a Hair Dryer ...

If you’re a fan of candles or have children who love wax crayons, spillages of melted wax, marks on walls, and crayons ground into carpets might well be a common thing in your house. Use a hair dryer to melt the wax, then soak it up with kitchen towel or sponge. It's that easy!

I love to spend hours going through old family photos. There is something about the black and white and sepia pictures that is just so different to the digital pictures we take today. When put in albums though, they can be difficult to remove (I was doing this so I could scan them into my computer). One of the ideal uses for a hair dryer is to turn it to cool and use it on the back of the page until the photo peels away easily.

You should wash your vinyl shower curtain to remove build-up of soap scum and bacteria, which gathers in stale water around the seams and hems. I get really annoyed however, when the curtain comes out of the washer all creased and takes forever to straighten out. Solution? It’s another one of the great lesser known ways to use a hair dryer. This also works for plastic tablecloths, and for new shower curtains and tablecloths when you first take them out of their packaging.

Do you hate putting your feet into cold shoes or chilly gumboots in winter? Simply warm them up with a blast of hot air from your hair dryer. 30 seconds in each shoe/boot should do it.

Even if you iron your clothes meticulously, if you have a crammed closet (come on girls – who doesn’t?), your shirts and tees can easily become creased. Instead of digging out the iron and ironing board, removing the light creases is another of the alternative uses for a hair dryer.

Got hard to reach places that gather dust? Use a hair dryer to blow the dust away. If you have shelves full of books or delicate ornaments/objets d’art that you can’t clean or polish, give them a good blast of cool air from a high wattage hair dryer. That will keep the dust from gathering.

Please only do this if you have a proper electrical socket in your bathroom and do not do it over a full sink of water. A fogged up bathroom mirror is rather a pain. After you’ve bathed, you want a nice clear mirror to carry out your facial beauty routine, do your hair, or put on makeup. Simply turn the heat setting to its hottest, aim the hair dryer at the mirror and hey presto – defogged in seconds.

Not many of us have a blast chiller in our kitchens, so we rely on a fridge and icebox for ‘fast’ freezing – which actually isn’t fast at all. If you want to frost a cake but don’t have time for it to set, blast it with a powerful hair dryer set to cool. This will give the frosting a slightly dull look, but simply give a finishing touch by turning up the setting to its hottest for a few second? Bet you’ve never seen a recipe that includes using a hair dryer!

Those were just some surprising and alternative uses for a hair dryer. Anyone have any more? I'm always looking for new ways to use a hair dryer!

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