You've Been Doing This Wrong Your Whole Life

Ice-cream lovers, rejoice! Say goodbye to the paralyzing debate that plagues you whenever you feel like a scoop of your favorite midnight snack (wait for it to melt? Or risk a serious wrist strain?). No longer will you have to opt for the easily-openable chocolate bar instead of your favorite tub of Ben & Jerry's, just to save time/your joints. No longer will you be forced to pick between what you really want, and what you have to the energy to get. Thanks to the Midnight Scoop, an ergonomically redesigned ice cream scoop, you'll never have to face that dreaded choice again.

No, it's not one of those thermal scoops that ruins your ice cream by pre-softening it (if I wanted a milkshake, I'd just get one, alright?). It's just an ingeniously designed new shape of scoop — curved and wide at the back, thin and wavy at the front — that shifts the effort of scooping from the wrist to the palm, so that you're not relying on your weak, flimsy joint to get the important task done. It's the brainchild of Michigan engineer Michael Chou who, according to his Kickstarter video, has been "obsessed" with making a good ice cream scoop for years.

"Everyone has been scooping ice cream wrong!" Chou says.

Here's how he explains the problem:

Current ice cream scoops are designed in a way that forces you to use weak wrist joints to scoop ice cream. When you are scooping ice cream with standard ice cream scoops, you are doing a prying motion. This prying motion puts tremendous amounts of stress on your weak wrist joints. Your brain then tries to save your wrists by not letting you pry very hard — thus making scooping ice cream very difficult.

The solution is a simple as a shift in where you put the pressure, by changing the shape of the handle:

You hold the curved end with the palm of your hand and "push" into the ice cream. This allows you to keep your wrists straight and protected while you use large muscles like your arms and chest – which are significantly stronger than your wrist.

Suddenly, it's easy as pie.

The scoop is made of solid aluminum, and is virtually indestructible — in the video, they show the scoop being run over by car, and surviving intact. (In fact, it even comes with a lifetime guarantee.) It's no wonder the project has already gained $87,077 in pledges, far surpassing its $17,500 goal.

It costs $50, comes in a variety of colors (including gold!), and will be available to buy from its online store in the next couple of weeks. "This — to me — is how to scoop ice cream properly," Chou says.

Yah, you said it, dude.

Images: Screenshots/Kickstarter