21 Products That Somehow Lost Their Original Purpose, As Shared In This Online Thread

I really miss what it should be

I grew up with MTV. Oh, those were the days...

This. So many arguements about putting the toilet seat up/down when honestly, everyone should just close the lid once they’re done. The particles spread up to 6 m (19 ft) otherwise.

Ace Ventura is all I can think of! "Everyone loves a slinky!"

Cleaning your keyboard?

I use them for tidying up mascara and eyeliner, or nail polish. You know, when you accidentally coloured outside the lines a bit.

What was their purpose lol? They are labelled as earbuds in my country.

I use them now to apply topical medication or clean really narrow stuff.

Can also be used to apply ointment to your skin without getting any on your hands.

Well I have been using them for Q - tip painting. Turns out really good

I use them to clean paint pallets

These are plastic q-tips. Please only ever buy the ones that are made with cardboard.

Originally, the inventor made them b/c he saw his wife trying to clean the baby's ears. I've mostly used them for art projects to do a nice "smudge" without getting it all over my fingers.

I use them to clean the outer part of my ear (which I've never had a problem with), to clean up after painting my nails, to clean my keyboard, to paint with, and to put vix or saline gel in my nose.

What is it? Collecting DNA and then create fiction mass murderer across the East and central Europe because of the contaminate Q-tips from factory?

applying ointments to wounds?

I use them to clean my N64 games.

We literally call them 'ear buds'. Oops.

Putting on makeup?

The only reason it says that on the package is for lawsuit defense. Idiots shove them in too far and sue the company. So, of course they're used for ear cleaning and they are made to do so, just don't shove them in so far...

I stuck one in my ear as a toddler and punctured my eardrum. I got ear wax and bad ear aches and was imitating my parents cleaning my ears but stuck it too far.

I used them for cleaning the lenses on CD/DVD/laserdisc players.

I use them for make up purposes and to clean my keyboard.

I'm down to four q-tips a week whereas I used to forage wax once a day sometimes twice in one day. Nasty habit.

Most new oven models don't have this

Isn't this in a lot of first aid kits and such for this exact reason?

Wonder how many minutes it took after the initial product release that 1st forester thought that it would be funny to shoot Mike on back.. Maybe hours but definetly not days..

Cherries and peaches as well...

Now this makes a lot of sense.

It's been approved for use as a human sedative, it's used in operating rooms and ICUs. And remember those Thai kids that were trapped in the flooded cave? Each kid got a shot of Ketamine before the final rescue, it kept them quiet as heroic spent hours dragging them to safety through a dangerous flooded cave.

. . . In mental health institutions.

Great for removing stubborn, leftover glue after pulling the label off a jar.

Oh my Jesus Christ. I haven’t thought about these since I was in primary school. Back then, I assumed the ‘pipe’ in pipe cleaner referred the things that ran along the walls of my house and I didn’t question it. It’s only now, reading this as a fully grown adult, that I realise it’s not that kind of pipe at all. That update has been pending for decades!

No thank you. I don't trust my clumsy hands to hold it steady at the neck.

Then they named it really badly!

People used to drive with at the very least - gloves, dust coats, goggles, and hats on, if not full face masks. Because cars didn't have roofs or windows and the roads weren't paved, anyone who drove the first cars was going to get all the dust, mud, or weather in the world in the face.

Nice try, Minoxidil salesperson!

It's still used for some heart problems, and I have no idea if anyone who's sick enough to need it for medical reasons can still enjoy the side effects.

I'm no expert but isn't that lip filler not botox?

I think MS Excel was always used as a data analysis tool, where as MS Access was used as an informal database since 1992