Wrapping Paper Hack Shows How To Handle Those Too-Short Pieces

A new viral video demonstrates a genius hack on how to perfectly wrap a rectangular gift — even when it seems as though there isn’t enough paper

Wrapping presents is truly a pain in the butt for most of us. One of the worst things that occurs during a wrapping session — and it happens way more frequently than we can deal with — is when we place an item on the wrapping paper, measuring and cutting out the amount needed, only to find that it falls about an inch too short. At that point, you either keep on going, handing over a sloppily wrapped gift that exposes its identity before the recipient even unwraps it, or redo the whole thing. Either way it sucks. Big time. Luckily, a hack is going viral that solves this, next-level wrapping paper crisis once and for all.

Waterstones, a U.K.-based bookseller, clearly knows a thing or two about wrapping rectangular objects — even with the least amount of wrapping paper possible. They shared a super short video of their genius wrapping hack on Twitter Monday, and people are seriously freaking out over it.

“This is a public service announcement,” they captioned the 7-second video on Twitter.

The video, shot from above, demonstrates the problem outlined previously. The wrapper attempts to use the cut paper vertically and horizontally to no avail. But instead of ripping up their rectangular piece of wrapping paper and shouting profanities (which we might be guilty of ourselves) they simply rotate the gift diagonally. And guess what? It works. Perfectly. Do you feel like an idiot, yet?

The video, originally shared by @BlossomHacks has amassed over 5.4 million views, liked over 42,000 times and retweeted over 10,500 times in less than a day, and people are wild over the hack. Most people found it life-changing.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1206536794545803264https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1206572712015085568

However a few claim they knew about it, like, forever ago, claiming to be shocked the rest of us hadn’t gotten the 411.

Journalist Georgina Adam claims she learned first learned about the hack in Japan, where, she points out, “wrapping is an art.”

This isn’t the first present-wrapping hack that has gone viral. Back in 2016, a 15-second solution courtesy of Japanese department store Takashimaya made the rounds. It was equally mind-blowing and changed our gift-wrapping lives for the better.

But if you still aren’t great at wrapping presents, don’t feel remotely bad. According to science, terribly wrapped presents actually make people happier. But if you want your wrapping sessions to include a little less profanity and frustrated sweating, this hack should hopefully help.