This should win me some kind of frugality award

So I read in my Tightwad Gazette about a way to get more out of a container of deoderant. The reader said she would save 3-4 old deoderants with just the little bit left in them and use the leftovers to make another half full container of deoderant. So I thought I'd try it.

I had four leftover deoderant containers, and I took a knife and scraped out every little bit that I could out of them (a knife with a sharp point, like a steak knife worked best). I pulled out that little plastic thing, and there was a whole bunch underneath it. I dumped all the tiny bits into a coffee mug and nuked it for ten second increments, until it was liquidy enough to pour back into one of the deoderant containers.

My husband actually thought I'd lost my mind. He stood there watching in wonder in the kitchen at what his crazy wife was doing with all these leftover deoderants. He asked me if I thought the deoderant was going to catch fire in the microwave.

I poured the liquidy deoderant back into one of the containers, and stuck it in the fridge to harden for a little bit. You would never know I did this--it looks like perfectly normal deoderant. I ended up getting about 1/3 of a container of deoderant out of it. I was curious how long it would last me, so I put the date (7/26) on top. I just used it again this morning, so I'm currently at 18 days and counting. It should last me at least another week.

This really made me realize something. Just think how much is wasted when we don't use every bit of a product in a package. Think of how much more packaging is created by all the new product that is made, when we could have just tried to finish up every last bit of something! I know when I get a new package of something, for some reason I just feel this urge to use it, even if I still have some of the other product leftover. My husband does this with toothpaste. I'm the one who usually ends up using all the dregs in the toothpaste tube. I once showed him that he stopped using the old toothpaste and had moved onto the new tube, and it took me 2 full weeks to get through the rest of the old tube! I've noticed this with contact solution too. It always seems like the bottle is just about empty, but sometimes that last little bit lasts another full week or two.

I would have never thought to do this with deoderant, and I'll admit it's a bit weird, but it really proved to me how true the old saying "waste not, want not" really is.