I’ve been wearing eyeglasses since I was a little kid, and try as I might to avoid it with best practices and habits, they still end up getting dirty and smudged seemingly out of nowhere. If you added up all the time I’ve spent cleaning my lenses since childhood, it probably amounts to an embarrassing number of hours.

That’s why I’ve been looking into ultrasonic cleaning machines lately. These things use science in a way that feels a little like magic.

You submerge a dirty item in liquid, turn the machine on, and it sends high-frequency waves through the fluid to create tens of thousands of microscopic bubbles that rapidly expand and implode, thereby causing all these little shock waves with enough force to remove contaminants and residues (dirt, oils, fingerprints, etc) from the surface of the item in question.

💡There’s a word for this specific effect: Cavitation. Never say I didn’t teach you anything on this website!

This gentle yet thorough ultrasonic bath takes only minutes to complete, and your eyeglasses — or jewelry, or cosmetic tools, or whatever else — will come out sparkling clean. For me, I can run it just before bed or first thing when I wake up, taking one less manual task off my hands each day, albeit a small one.

Get the InvisiClean ultrasonic cleaning machine for $70 on Amazon.