You wipe the fridge door and it looks worse. There is now a haze across it, you can see every pass you made, and within a day the handprints are back exactly where they were. The door has become a record of everyone who walked past it.

Stainless is not smooth. It is rolled, and rolling leaves a directional grain of very fine lines. Skin oil settles into those lines, so a dry cloth polishes the high points and leaves the oil down in the grain, which is what you are seeing as haze. Water-based sprays make it worse, because they lift the oil, spread it evenly, and then evaporate and leave it behind as a film.

An oil-based cleaner works with that instead of against it. It picks up the existing oil into a compatible carrier so it lifts out rather than smearing, then leaves a very thin even layer along the grain. That layer is why it resists prints afterwards: a finger now touches the coating, not the metal, and comes away without leaving a mark down in the lines.

Which is also why you wipe with the grain, never in circles. Circles cut across the lines and put product into them at every angle, and that shows up as swirl the first time light hits the door.

Here is the limit. It leaves an oil layer, and some people cannot stand that. On a door in direct sun it can look faintly wet for the first hour, and if you use too much it will hold dust. Less is genuinely better here, and that is a hard instruction to follow with a wipe already loaded.

It is also only for real stainless. A great deal of what is sold as stainless is a coated or printed finish, and this will do nothing helpful on those. Rub an inconspicuous corner first.

And it is not a cleaner for food mess. Grease and dried spills come off with soap first. This is the step after that.