To be honest, I worked in an ice cream shop for several years and never once understood why the ice cream scoops had different colors. I didn’t even think to ask. Only years later do I finally know the reason. Each color represents a different-sized scoop. Whoops, guess I messed up one too many orders. No wonder why my customers were always so happy…
Ice cream scoops can be given in over a dozen different sizes. This is based on how many scoops go in a cup and how many scoops fill up a 32-ounce container. While the rainbow colors of the handles look joyful and cute, they serve a purpose other than making you feel warm and happy inside.
Pom-Poms on Winter Hats
When you went searching for a winter hat to handle the freezing temperatures of winter, you may have opted for one with a cute little furry pom-pom that sits on the top. While this is a fashion trend for those living in cold temperatures, the trend actually originates back to sub-zero Scandinavia where people have been rocking this look year-round since the age of the Vikings! The first sign of the pom-pom was on the Viking god Freyr. A statuette of Freyr was found in which he was shown wearing a hat or helmet with a pom-pom on top of it.
The word pom-pom dates back to the 18th century. It comes from the French word 'pompon', which is a small ball made from fabric or feathers. The pom-pom was ideal for heavier larger trinkets that soldiers in those times had been using. Instead, the pom-pom could be made inexpensively from scraps of yarn. People everywhere fell in love with the fluffiness and color of the pom-pom, and just like that, it has stuck throughout centuries.
Wooden Coat Hangers
Is your closet full of wooden coat hangers, plastic ones, or a mish-mash of both? Hangers can say a lot about an individual. But did you know why wooden hangers exist, to begin with? They are designed to keep away moths and other creatures that would damage your clothes. Heavy clothing, like coats and dresses made out of wool, is more vulnerable to various insects.
Wooden hangers are made from cedar wood which is known to naturally help repel moths and other bugs. It also absorbs moisture and odors. So if you find that bugs are attracted to the clothes in your closet, you know how to take care of the problem!
Flaps on Juice Boxes
How could we have been doing something so simple, so wrong, for our entire childhood? If you're lucky enough, your parents at least mentioned something about those flaps being there, even if they fed you some bogus myth like "the flaps help you get the most liquid out of the box." Instead, I was left with juice on my hands and a half-empty juice box after wrongly holding the box by its middle, which caused the juice to gush out of the straw. The horror.
Those flaps are meant to be turned outward to prevent this from happening. Easy to transport? Check. Spill-proof? Check. My whole life has been a lie? Double-check. Now that I know that the bulky flaps can be folded outward to make it easier for small-handed children to hold them, there's no way I will let another child suffer from ignorance the way that I did.
Ridges on Coins
We aren't sure if you've noticed this, but both quarters and dimes have rough edges (as opposed to pennies and nickles, which don't). Go ahead, we'll wait patiently for you to pull some coins out of your wallet so that you can compare the difference, that is, if you even have any coins considering that credit cards are taking over the world. To set the scene, the year is 1972, and the Coinage Act has just established the U.S. Mint. Back then, coins were stamped in different weights to show the real value of the coin.
In order to prevent criminals from filing shavings from the sides of the coins and selling the metal, minters put ridges on coins (a process known as reeding) to make it easy to tell if the edges had been shaved off. Another benefit to doing this was that it also made it more difficult to counterfeit the money. Nowadays, coins are no longer made from precious metals so this isn't an issue. But, we still have edges on our coins.