A Redditor recently found herself in a predicament that will be rather familiar to a lot of our women readers and maybe a few men as well. After enjoying herself a little too much at a party she discovered that the cap was missing to her tube of lipstick. Thankfully her husband is an engineer – and a maker – and he was able to save the day with his Rostock Max 3D printer.
The replacement cap was printed in PLA on the Reddit user’s husbands Rostock Max 3D printer. The owner of the shiney new lipstick cap said that when it was originally printed it was a little snug, but since it was still warm and a little malleable it ended up hardening up into the perfect fit once they pushed it on. And if it wasn’t for the slight striation I’d never have guessed that wasn’t the original cap!
Okay, so maybe using a $1,000 robot to replace the cap of a $2 tube of Wet n Wild Cherry Bomb lipstick is a little bit of overkill. But I’m sure that any married maker will understand the benefit of spending 9 cents worth of filament to save your partner an inconvenient trip to the drug store. And beyond a few moments of marital bliss, a clever spouse could use this to help justify more investments into 3D printing. I mean, a Rostock Max is great, but wouldn’t an Orion Delta be better?
We’ve all seen plenty of 3D printer manufacturers use the “replacing the knob on a stove” example of how 3D printing can impact our lives, and this is really sort of the same thing. Could she have easily replaced her inexpensive lipstick? Certainly, but why throw away something that’s perfectly useable for want of a cap when you can simply create a new one? Would it take any more time to do than getting into a car and driving to a store?
Generally we here at 3DPI cover stories that have, well, a little more to them than this but honestly I just thought this was kind of funny, and actually when you think about it, it kind of represents what 3D printing is supposed to do for our lives, albeit a slightly ridiculous example. 3D printing wasn’t sold to us originally as a way to print new organs, create jet engines or print our food, we were sold a promise that we could design the world around us one 3D printed part at a time. It was the promise that all we had to do was dream something up and we could have a machine make it for us.
Yes, wasting the time, effort and material on a 3D printed replacement for a cheap tube of lipstick is about as shrewd and economical of a decision as 3D printing the cap to a cheap ballpoint pen. But if you can do something, and the cost is negligible, well, why the hell not do something just because you can?
