If you take your car to an auto shop, it could mean that you’ll be ripped off by them. Thankfully, there are a lot of cheap ways to fix your car yourself without having to take it in. And when it comes to scratches on your car, there are so many ways that you can fix it yourself with materials you might have at home or at the very least, at a much cheaper price. Here are some of the easiest hacks that you can try to fix a scratch on your car. 

1. Toothpaste 

Not only is it good for making your teeth look great, but toothpaste is also good at making small scratches go away. You’ll have to make sure that the scratch is actually a small one, and an easy test that you can do is to see if you can grab the scratch with a fingernail. 

If you can, it’s too big for toothpaste to handle, but if you can’t, then you can run up to your bathroom sink and grab what you need. You won’t need much either since you just need some toothpaste and some wet cloth. Any toothpaste will work, but whitening toothpastes are the best for this job. 

Just put some toothpaste on the wet cloth and then rub the toothpaste against the scratch in small circular motions. This should remove the scratch after a little while. 

2. Duct tape

Duct tape is a hack for a lot of things, and it’s a hack for car scratches, too. It’s cheating a bit since you’re just covering up the scratch, but sometimes that’s all you’re looking for.

There are a lot of colors of duct tapes, so you’d need to find the one that matches the color of your car. When you do, just tape over the scratch. This won’t remove the scratch, but it’ll make your car look better.

3. Nail polish

This is a great option for many, as nail polish is cheap and it comes in a lot of colors. Thus, no matter the color of your car, nail polish can cheaply fix those scratches. Nail polish also comes with a brush so you just need to find the right color. 

However, finding the right color is more difficult than just looking around. Some nail polish will turn into a different color when it sets, so you may have to test the colors to find the perfect fit. When you do though, it’s just a matter of putting the nail polish onto the scratch. 

4. Shoe polish

Like nail polish, shoe polish can fix a lot of scratches and it can do that very easily. Shoe polish usually comes with a brush too, so it’s a very simple job. However, unlike nail polish, shoe polish generally only works on darker shades of paint. There are lighter shades of shoe polish available, but most shoe polish laying around a house is likely of the darker variety.

5. Artwork 

This is a more creative option. Like covering up scars or blemishes with a tattoo, you can cover up scratches on your car with artwork. Getting decals or other art done on your car will generally be cheaper than getting the scratches fixed at a body shop, and it will probably look better too. 

This option is better with larger scratches, as a bigger scratch will allow for a more elaborate and detailed piece of art on your car. It can work for smaller scratches too, but generally speaking, artwork is a much better option for larger scratches than it is for smaller ones.