My Main Tweeze 

by

Kaitlyn Gibbens

Baylor University

 

Picture one of those “as-seen-on-TV commercials” for a new product. The woman on the

commercial, pictured in black and white, is trying to perform some delicate, intricate task with

her hands—say place a rhinestone onto wet glue—but her fingers just aren’t small enough to

complete the task efficiently. She fumbles aimlessly and drops the rhinestone face down into the

wet glue, ruining its shine. The woman releases a distressed sigh and a giant red X slams onto the

screen. The company then proceeds to tell the consumer how to solve this problem, among

others, with its fancy new product. However, this product has been used since the time of the

ancient Egyptians. Que the smiling faces and bring the color back on the screen because tweezers

will solve a lot of your problems.

 

While tweezers are far from the new, high-tech innovations we see today, they continue

to prove their worth in a wide range of applications. They serve as a simple extension to the

human hand and allow us to pick up tiny objects and perform detailed tasks that could not

otherwise be accomplished with the bulky fingers. In addition to their obvious in-home medical

uses, tweezers are helpful in a number of situations such as beauty use, use in the kitchen,

crafting, household cleanup, and professional use in forensic science and the medical field.

Generally, I would say that tweezers are most commonly used for in-home medical tasks.

Almost every first aid kit comes complete with a pair of shiny silver tweezers. They are great to

remove splinters or fragments of glass from skin, and they can be used to remove dirt or debris

from wounds. Plus, they are great to remove ingrown hairs after shaving. The use of tweezers

does not stop there, though.

 

As a woman, I keep a pair of tweezers handy in my makeup bag for beauty applications. I

have my eyebrows waxed about every six weeks, but I use tweezers to pluck out stray hairs in

between waxes. Tweezers are also the best tool to use when applying fake eyelashes because you

cannot close enough to your lash line with just your fingers. In addition, tweezers can be used to

clean the hair out of hair brushes and remove small pieces of lint or pet hair from clothing. The

best beauty use I have found for tweezers, however, is to untangle necklace chains.

 

The next great application for tweezers is in the kitchen; I absolutely love to bake and

cook, and tweezers definitely come in handy. First of all, if you have ever gotten an egg shell

into your bowl after cracking an egg, you know that it’s almost impossible to pick up with your

fingers. Tweezers are a really great tool to remove those pesky little shell fragments. Another

great use for tweezers in the kitchen is to remove crumbs from underneath your stove burner or

from your toaster (while it’s unplugged, of course). The tweezers let you get into small spaces

and keep your fingers from getting burned. I also love to use tweezers for decorating cakes.

Tweezers allow me to place decorations, such as edible pearls, on cakes very precisely—

something my fingers don’t allow.

 

Another great application for tweezers is crafting. For the most part, I use tweezers to

apply tiny rhinestones to anything from t-shirts to picture frames. Tweezers allow me to place

rhinestones precisely on the glue without them flipping over or falling in the wrong place. I also

use tweezers for deft tasks such as threading tiny beads onto string, removing unwanted threads

from a sewing project, or threading a needle if I do not have a threader nearby. You can also use

tweezers to place screws into tiny holes, or for working on hobbies such as model building or

watch making.

 

On a less-fun note, tweezers are great to use for cleanup around the house. I have seen

my mom use tweezers to get crumbs out from between the keys on the computer keyboard, and

she also uses tweezers to get little particles of dust and lint from small, hard-to-reach places like

the slats of our tower fan. I, on the other hand, use tweezers to remove hair from my shower

drain so I do not have to touch it.

 

Finally, tweezers are not just for household use; they are also used in the professional

world. For one, tweezers are used in the field of forensic science. CSI agents and police officers

use tweezers to collect small pieces of evidence that may be too small to grab with their hands,

and tweezers keep them from contaminating the evidence. Likewise, medical examiners may use

tweezers to remove suspicious objects from a body for further examination. Secondly, tweezers

are used professionally in the medical field. Most commonly, tweezers are used during surgery to

remove foreign objects from the body, grasp and hold tissue around the surgical area, and help

with suturing the surgical incision at the end of the surgery. Tweezers can also be used to handle

potentially dangerous medications that can be absorbed through the skin. My father, a

veterinarian, uses tweezers for many other medical uses as well. When he does research, he uses

tweezers to move specimens between different petri dishes. On animals specifically, he uses

tweezers to remove ticks from dogs and specialized tweezers to remove porcupine quills from

animals.

 

There are so many different uses for tweezers—certainly more than can be enumerated in

a short essay. Tweezers find their place in our daily lives in our first aid kits, makeup bags,

kitchens, craft rooms, cleaning buckets, crime scenes, and hospitals. And, over the years they

may have become more high-tech: making different types of tweezers for different tasks, making

them easier to hold, or nimbler at grabbing slick objects. I even have a pair of tweezers with a

tiny flashlight to help you see to pluck your eyebrows. Nevertheless, this ancient tool has

certainly endured the test of time and will continue to do so.