In our homes, dirt is a sign of human forgetfulness and absence, such as the dust on forgotten shelves, books and objects. But dirt is also a sign of our lives. Sharing a meal, cooking, watching TV while munching popcorn on the couch, going to the beach or playing on a lawn: all our daily activities, whether solitary or shared, generate heterogeneous forms of dirt that we have to deal with in order to live a peaceful social life.In this sense, all everyday practices of hygiene can be conceived as means of maintaining social order: can the dog get on the bed? Can we enter the house with our shoes on? Can we eat on the floor or not? And who can? What happens when someone break the rules?Hygiene is not just a contemporary obsession, but a universe of practices, actions, objects that underlies deep values and mechanisms for regulating human and non-human relationships.The advertising discourse promoting cleaning objects and products reveals the complexity of these social relations. In commercials, vacuum cleaners, robots, and detergents clean dust and crumbs, invisible viruses, food particles, and human and pet hair from all corners of our homes. Advertising thus tells the stories of the lives we lead through the dirt we produce as presupposes the social regulating system of the coexistence between human and non-human actors.This paper proposes a semiotic analysis of advertising texts for hygiene products to explore how practices and attitudes towards cleanliness shape cohabitation and sociality.