typical floss wasting way to floss, plus it strangles and hurts the two fingers on your hands.
The sure grip loop method, and floss mass conserving method (needs about 12" to start)
I learned this hack from the web somewhere, maybe lifehacks.
Whoever came up with the idea, we salute you.
What led to this awesome discovery, is after trying several different brands of wax dental floss over the decades, the only one that seemed to work properly was Johnson and johnson's brand.
J&J brand seems to strike just the right balance between not too waxy so that it's frictionless and sliding around your teeth when you need a little more grip and friction to extract food particles, but waxy enough so the floss doesn't just get cut up by your teeth and leaves tiny strands of floss like mango fibre that get stuck in your teeth and even after you remove them it feels like you still have something stuck in them.
Anyway, one time the Target store had been out of J&J brand floss for quite a while, I couldn't wait any longer, so I bought their generic store brand wax floss.
Worst floss ever. Too waxy. So waxy, that even if you wrap 10 miles of floss on your left and right fingers, when wet the floss still slides off your fingers! I was debating whether it was worth the time to go return this worthless floss, and decided to do some searching on the web to see if there was a better floss product or flossing technique to prevent finger slippage.
I found that life hack on making the dental floss into a loop.
I demonstrate in the video, using the shitty target brand floss. It's so waxy, I do the first knotted loop 4 times, and the second knot 3 times. Because if you don't loop that many times, it's so waxy the knot will come undone.
The starting length for the floss is about 12 inches.
Start with dry hands, dry floss, otherwise wet hands makes it really hard to tie the loop.
Before you secure the loop on the 2nd knot, you can adjust the location of the intersection so that the loop is smaller or larger according to your preference.
The final part of the video, where I demonstrate grabbing the loop with many fingers from both sides, is the wondrous property of this floss hack that makes your grip possible when you floss, no matter how slippery the wax, or how wet your hands are.
Additional bonus of this loop hack: Save the loop of floss and reuse it several times. I can usually get about 4-6 uses out of it before it starts to break apart and leaving string residue in my teeth.
This is great if you're going backpacking, just pre loop a few loops instead of a whole cannister of floss taking up weight and space.
Now before you say, "gross, that's not hygenic reusing floss."
Let me ask you this. Do you throw away your toothbrush after each use? Because the same bacteria that you think is gross and un hygenic goes onto the floss and brush. So if you can rinse and reuse the brush, same with the floss.
Summary of benefits
1. loop floss grip doesn't strangle your fingers, the pressure is distributed across many fingers
2. you're not dependent on J&J brand (the best quality wax floss), you can now use all kinds of shitty brands of floss and make them work for you.
3. using the loop grip, you start with 12" instead of 18", so right off the bat, you're using 33% less floss. And since you can reuse each loop let's say an average of 4 times, your cannister of floss will last more than 5 times longer (4 + 33% x 4)
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