Naomi Campbell's not crazy: planes are 550 times dirtier than your toilet seat

Every time Naomi Campbell boards a plane, she pulls on a pair of latex gloves and rubs down every surface she can reach with antiseptic wipes. 

The 49-year-old supermodel shared the curious pre-flight ritual this week in a video of herself boarding a Qatar Airways flight to Doha. As she reaches her seat, she fishes the gloves out of her Louis Vuitton bag, calling them “the best part of this whole thing”, snaps them on, then opens a pack of Dettol wipes, and starts buffing: the armrests, the screen, the remote control, the tray table and even the surfaces around the windows. In fact, “anything you could possibly touch,” she says. 

“This is what I do on every plane I get on,” she adds, still scrubbing away. “I do not care what people think of me. It’s my health and it makes me feel better.” 

The video has racked up more than a million views and many more opinions. Some praise the supermodel for cleaning the area herself and not getting an assistant to do it; other accuse her of implicitly "throwing shade" at the aircraft crew.

But is the supermodel’s on-board hygiene ritual just a touch overboard? Maybe not. 

TimesLive reported in March how a study by Travelmath had found the dirtiest place on a plane to be the one surface that our food rests on – the tray table.

With germs counted in colony-forming units (CFU) per square inch, here’s how some of the places in airports and on planes fared. As a comparison, keep in mind that the average home toilet seat has 172 CFUs:

• Tray table: 2,155 CFUs

• Drinking fountain buttons: 1,240 CFUs

• Overhead air vent: 285 CFUs

• Lavatory flush button: 265 CFUs

• Seatbelt buckle: 230 CFUs

• Bathroom stall locks: 70 CFUs

A different study, by insurancequotes.com, last year declared the toilet flush button the dirtiest place on a plane, with 95,000 CFUs. More alarmingly, since you eat off it, the tray table was found to serve up 11,595 CFUs. 

That makes the flush button 550 times more germy than your average home toilet seat; and the tray table 67 times more.

Other culprits are seat belt buckles, airport self-check-in screens and gate bench armrests. 

After the wipedown, Campbell goes on to tuck a pink cover over her entire chair before sitting down.  Finally, she dons a silk surgical face mask. 

“I will eventually end up like this for the entire flight,” she says as she wraps it over her face.

“No matter what plane you take, private or commercial, as the plane descends, people start coughing and sneezing,” she says. “And the coughing and sneezing makes me … I just can’t. So this is my protection from people coughing and sneezing.”

“As much as I travel, I should get sick so much more with colds and stuff, and I’m blessed that I don’t. And I really think that this helps me.”

Now that we've seen the numbers, we might just be rushing out for our own packets of pre-flight Dettol wipes too.