I threw away a $22 tube of sunscreen in July because it had stopped coming out. Two days later I was looking for something under the sink, saw the tube in the bin, and, mostly out of stubbornness, fished it out and cut it open with kitchen scissors.

There was easily two weeks of sunscreen in there. Not a smear. A visible, scrapeable layer coating the entire inside of the tube, plus a slug of it sitting in the shoulder just below the cap where no amount of squeezing was ever going to reach.

I then did what any reasonable person would do, which is go through the whole bathroom cabinet with a pair of scissors like a lunatic. Every "empty" tube on the shelf gave up something. By the end I had a small jar of moisturizer, half a tube of toothpaste, and a very clear sense of having been quietly losing money for years.

Why the last bit never comes out

Toothpaste, lotion, sunscreen and hair products are all viscous non-Newtonian fluids, which is a technical way of saying they're thick and they cling. A film of product bonds to the inside wall of the tube and simply will not shear off under the pressure your hand can generate: you're not squeezing hard enough, and you never will be.

The other loss is structural. Tubes have a shoulder where the wide body narrows into the neck, and that angle creates a dead zone the squeeze never reaches. Same with the crimped seam at the bottom.

How much is left varies by product: thin gels give up nearly everything, thick creams and sunscreens hold on hard. Across my bathroom it ran somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of the tube. And it's a real enough problem that materials scientists have built entire slippery tube coatings to solve it commercially, which tells you it isn't just you being impatient.

Step 1: Squeeze it properly before you cut anything

Roll the tube tightly from the sealed end upward and hold the roll with a binder clip or a clothespin. Most people squeeze from the middle, which pushes product backward as much as forward and leaves a reservoir behind the pinch point. Rolling from the bottom moves everything in one direction only. A $2 metal tube key or wringer does the same job with more force, and for anything you buy repeatedly it pays for itself quickly.

Toothpaste: Why You Should Always Cut Open Your Lotion and Toothpaste Tubes (The Hidden 20%)

Step 2: Warm the tube before the final squeeze

Run the tube under hot tap water for thirty seconds, or hold it between your palms, then squeeze again. Viscosity drops sharply with temperature, warm lotion flows far more easily than cold lotion, so a tube that's genuinely finished at 18°C often isn't at 35°C. This alone gets you an extra few days out of most things, and it costs nothing. Don't microwave anything, and don't do it to aerosols.

Bathroom: Why You Should Always Cut Open Your Lotion and Toothpaste Tubes (The Hidden 20%)

Step 3: Cut across the top, not the middle

Cut straight across the tube just below the shoulder, keeping the cap end intact. Everyone's instinct is to cut it in half lengthwise, but cutting below the shoulder does two useful things: it opens the tube into a wide-mouthed cup you can get a finger or a spatula into, and it rescues the product trapped in the neck, which is often the single biggest pocket left. Watch the cut edge: metal-lined and foil tubes leave a genuinely sharp rim.

Scissors: Why You Should Always Cut Open Your Lotion and Toothpaste Tubes (The Hidden 20%)

Step 4: Scrape both halves out properly

Use a small silicone spatula, a butter knife, or a clean cosmetic brush to scrape the walls of both pieces, and decant into a tiny clean jar or a contact lens case. Toothpaste you can just use straight from the open tube on the counter: dip the brush in. Anything you're decanting, use a clean utensil and clean hands, since you've just opened a sealed container and the preservative system in there wasn't designed for fingers.

Spatula: Why You Should Always Cut Open Your Lotion and Toothpaste Tubes (The Hidden 20%)
My Expert Tip: Pump bottles are the far bigger thief, and nobody thinks about them because you can't see inside. A pump's dip tube stops short of the base, and the shoulder of the bottle sits above the tube entirely, so a "finished" pump routinely still holds a substantial slug of product: in my experience noticeably more than a tube does. Unscrew the pump, invert the old bottle mouth-to-mouth into the new one, and leave it overnight; thick lotion will migrate down on its own while you sleep. For rigid bottles that won't pour, cut the top off with a serrated knife. I got nearly a third of a bottle of an expensive conditioner this way and felt genuinely swindled.

Step 5: Nest the two halves back together

Slide the cut top back over the open bottom like a lid. It makes a surprisingly decent container, keeps dust and bathroom spray out, and stops the surface drying into a skin: which matters a lot for anything water-based. A cut-open tube standing uncovered on a shelf will go crusty within a few days; nested, mine have stayed usable for a couple of weeks, which is all you need to finish them.

Lotion: Why You Should Always Cut Open Your Lotion and Toothpaste Tubes (The Hidden 20%)

Step 6: Know what not to cut open

Skip anything sterile or medicated: eye creams, eye drops, prescription ointments, wound care, and anything that came from a pharmacy with instructions. Those products rely on the sealed container to stay uncontaminated, and there's no saving worth an eye infection. Same goes for anything you've had open a long time or that has separated or changed smell. And use what you recover within a couple of weeks rather than saving it for the season after next.

Cream: Why You Should Always Cut Open Your Lotion and Toothpaste Tubes (The Hidden 20%)

What the scissors actually got me

Thirty seconds per tube, and roughly one to two extra weeks out of each one. Across the six products I buy on repeat, toothpaste, sunscreen, moisturizer, conditioner, shaving cream, hand cream, that worked out to about $90 a year, which is not going to change anyone's life but is completely free money for a task that takes less time than reading this sentence took.

What stuck with me more is how invisible it was. I'd been throwing away a fifth of several things I deliberately shopped around for, and I only found out because I was too stubborn to let a sunscreen tube go. There's a decent chance there's a tube in your bathroom bin right now with a fortnight left in it.

Go cut open the last tube you threw out: then hit the share buttons below and send this to whoever in your house declares things empty the moment they stop being easy.