One of the strangest things I discovered about my HTC One M8 is that even as pristine condition it is in, there were some annoying scratch marks on the lens of the rear facing camera and I had no idea how they got there. Especially since there were no other scratch marks anywhere on the device. So I did some digging.
The back story –
My detective partner was good ole Google who lead me to none other than XDA Forums along with some typical Yahoo Answers. But with collected data, most people went the route to send the device back to HTC or the carrier and not all the cases went in their favor. Some of the stories I read the repair service wanted to charge a hefty fee for whatever fixes that were or did take place. In my gut I knew this problem wasn’t my fault, there was something more to the story and I REALLY preferred to to find a fix myself. No offense to stores, I just don’t like to go in them if I can help it. A lot of my reasoning is because I have a rooted device and I want to avoid any headaches that along with rooted phones vs. stores. I would have to unroot, lock the bootloader back, etc… just a lot of hoops to go through. So needless to say I wanted to avoid that scenario at all cost. Last resort indeed.
As I read through the forums and boards, I did notice many people were pleased with how well the HTC customer service treated them, even with rooted devices, they had no issues. Bringing a rooted phone to a store or carrier customer service you might not have as much luck.
Through all my research, which took a little as a matter of fact, I stumbled upon a home-fix. In other words, there is a fix that you can do using household products. So are you ready for what I found and what worked?
The fix –
Toothpaste. Yes, you read that correctly. Toothpaste was the obscure fix I would have never thought of. But then I remembered cleaning my vehicles headlights with toothpaste and it working with that. So I was like, well I guess toothpaste is multidimensional in it’s life purpose. So I gave it shot.
What to do –
- Gather a tube of toothpaste, q-tip and I got a bottle of nail polish remover for backup
- Swab a small dab of toothpaste and rub around the camera lens for a while. I want to say I ended up using about 3 q-tips. After a minute or two you will notice the lens to start to clear up.
- Wipe away the toothpaste and proceed to swab a dab of nail polish remover to apply to the lens
- Pretty much do what you as you did with the tootpaste
- You should see a blackish residue on the q-tip and again the lens will begin to clear up
- Wipe the polish off and bah-da-bing-bah-da-boom!
After completing those steps you should have lens that looks brand new. Now since I have posted the video about how I fixed my scratches, people have commented sharing other solutions with other liquids and supplies. Such as Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and alcohol wipes. From what I can tell, anything that lightly breaks matter down will work. Either way, I was a happy camper to get rid of those scratches.
Why at first that mysterious layer even exists on a flagship device? You got me. But if you run into this problem, you will have a fix ready and available.
Let me know in the comments if this is something that helped you out or if you found another solution.
