TikTok Is Opening Wine Bottles With A Super Dangerous Hack
TikTok has established a reputation as a bottomless library of life hacks. Some of them are quite clever, such as poaching eggs in an air fryer or that viral feta pasta that caused a national cheese shortage and (even more astonishingly) got Gordon Ramsay's seal of approval. But other times, TikTok takes a big swing and misses the ball entirely.
Some of the more ridiculous hacks the app has produced include putting garlic in your nostrils to clear congestion (according to the Cleveland Clinic, it does the exact opposite) and poaching chicken in NyQuil (which is extremely dangerous, according to The Takeout and anyone with a shred of common sense).
On November 13, TikTok user @FonDon97 posted a video demonstrating how she opens a bottle of wine using a hairstyling iron. She uses the iron to grip the bottleneck, and after just a few seconds, the cork pops out. At first glance, it may seem like a clever hack (at least, for those of us with long hair and flat irons on hand), and it certainly seems to have caught on with the TikTok crowd. The video has more than 230,000 likes and has been shared more than 28,000 times. These numbers suggest that a lot of folks are at least considering trying this hack to open their wine bottles. But you could get seriously hurt if you try it, as a warning across the TikTok video now reads.
Why this wine-opening 'hack' is a bad idea
Why is it a bad idea to pop wine corks with a flat iron? A study published in the journal "Procedia Engineering" in 2013 explains that glass is bad at conducting heat. So if you apply a hot iron to the neck of your wine bottle, the heat won't spread throughout the entire structure. You might think this is a good thing because you don't want the part of the bottle you're holding to get hot. But it's actually quite dangerous. Rapid and uneven changes in temperature can cause thermal shock, where one portion of the structure expands or contracts faster than the rest.
You know the cracking sound you hear when you drop ice into a glass of water? That happens because the outer surface of the ice heats up way faster than the inside, causing it to crack. That's thermal shock in action, explains APP Manufacturing. Flat irons can reach temperatures up to 450 F, according to Self, which could definitely crack a wine bottle, especially if it's been in the fridge. It isn't necessarily the heat itself that makes glass break, but how quickly and evenly the temperature of the glass changes.
Reference.com points out that thermal shock can be avoided by heating the whole glass structure slowly and evenly, something the flat iron hack doesn't do. TikTok user @FonDon97 was lucky, but you don't want to risk broken glass in your hands.
There are better ways to open your wine without a corkscrew
Ideally, you should use a corkscrew to open wine. And it doesn't need to be fancy, unless you want it that way. You'll often see waiters at fine dining restaurants use simple, pocket-sized corkscrews, and they do just fine. But then again, there's always the chance that you misplace your corkscrew or leave it behind at a friend's house or a picnic. If that ends up being the case, leave the flat iron in the bathroom and try a different hack. There are many ways to uncork a wine bottle that don't involve the risk of glass shards in your hands.
Insider offers some neat ideas for DIY corkscrews. The most straightforward method is to use an actual screw. Drive it about halfway into the cork using a screwdriver, then pull it out with the back of a hammer. Delish also notes that you can do the same thing with a nail instead of a screw, or the tines of a fork instead of the back of a hammer.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. Insider also notes that you can push the cork into the bottle with the handle of a wooden spoon. You can even pop a cork with heat by using a lighter instead of a flat iron, which won't cause such an extreme temperature change.