Sensible individuals would avoid the hassle and recycle the bottle, but I’m not blamed for becoming smart, and it appears I’m not alone, The internet has spent a significant amount of time inventing numerous strategies for boosting lotion usage. But whichever of these methods truly works, and which is the most straightforward? I recently did a series of tests to establish the answers since I lacked the awareness to know better.
[RB]So let’s check the top 10 ways to get the last drop of lotion out of the bottle.
The inverted storing approach
[RB]When your pump bottle breaks, the simplest solution is to use the fundamental forces of the cosmos to turn it upside-down, enabling attraction to coax all that priceless lotion to the top. The pump may then be removable and shaken out.
Ease: This would be roughly a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 needs a 4-year degree in engineering and 1 and something a child could perform. Because pump bottles aren’t supposed to be turned inside out, you’ll need to prop the thing up in some way. And the bottom will also get fairly dirty as you draw lotion from it.
Effectiveness: This would be a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 representing the lotion appearing miraculously on your hands and 1 requiring you to consume an energy bar before trying to moisturize. It works OK at first, but eventually, there will be lotion remaining to the edges of the bottles that you will be unable to remove, no matter how much gravitation or rage you direct at it.
The procedure of cutting the bottle
[RB]You may think of this as a brute force approach, in which you take a pair of sharp scissors and split the bottles in half, allowing you to either move the leftover lotion into some other storage container or just replace the top to preserve the substance as you dip into it.
Ease: A 4. Since many pumping bottles are constructed of thick, durable plastic, cutting into them can be difficult, and you must be careful not to injure yourself.
[RB]Effectiveness: An 8, because you’ll have complete access to your lotion, you’ll be able to frantically scrape it out, getting to every last dot. The disadvantage is that you’ll have a ripped-up bottle of lotion on your counter for a week, advertising to all your customers that you’re an obsessive oddball.
The bottle cap squeeze method
Removing the pump top and replacing it with a squeezed bottle cap stolen from another, better-designed product is a surprisingly easy solution. When you combine this with the upside-down approach, extracting your valuable hand cream becomes much easier.
[RB]Ease: While nothing could be simpler than extracting a plastic cap and replacing it with a differing plastic cap, finding the proper squeeze cap can be tricky. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any empty squeezed bottles of various diameters sitting about in my perfectly regular, non-serial-killer-vibe house, and I’m not looking to purchase one just for this. Let’s call it a 5.
(You can also buy a Zero Waste Top or a related bottle-emptying cap, but they are more expensive than using a shampoo bottle cap.)
Effectiveness: Yes, it will work, and you will receive the most of the lotion that you paid for. However, because of squeezed technique requires a different amount of lotion to operate, it won’t get it all.
The completely tubular approach
[RB]Engineers throughout the world generally extract $0.50 worth of value by investing $2 on resources and thirty minutes of their valuable time on a project. This entails purchasing a length of vinyl tubing that is slightly bigger than the pump shaft and putting it to the bottom of the pump so that it snakes down into the lost lotion reservoir.
[RB]Ease: Because it requires tasks such as checking the shaft diameter, going to the store to buy supplies, and reducing tubing down, it gets a ten. Sure, you can do that, and you can probably re-use your super pump in other pump bottles once you’ve finished, but you won’t feel good about yourself.
Effectiveness: While this will help, you’ll ultimately run into a new level of subsurface lotion remains that your MacGyvered tubing won’t be able to suck up.
The method of “heat and serve”
Soak your bottle in a dish of boiling water for a few minutes. This will warm the lotion within, causing it to become more liquidy, allowing you to simply pour it into another container.
[RB]Ease: An 8 because it requires boiling water (hot water from the faucet will loosen your lotion but not liquefy it). After that, immerse the bottle for around 2 minutes. Keep in mind that your bottle will most likely float, so you’ll need to hold it down to keep the lotion at the bottom immersed (or devise a contraption to hold it in place for you). So there are a lot of steps to do, plus the risk of scalding.
[RB]Effectiveness: It’s as close to a ten as you can get. After heating, the lotion will actually stream out of your bottle, and you have a good possibility of getting almost all of it out. Because the lotion will turn vicious after it cools, this is a successful albeit time-consuming method.
All of these strategies will eventually be obsolete because of space-age nonstick coatings. We’re all stuck doing scientific lab experiments until that beautiful future arrives, so wall Street receives a little less of our hard-earned money.
