Internet Divided: Is It a Butter Spreader or a Shoehorn?

The internet loves a good mystery, and Reddit’s r/whatisit community found one in the unlikeliest place: a Spanish in-law’s home. A visiting Redditor posted a photo of a small, clear plastic object and asked for help identifying it. Simple request. Except the comment section quickly descended into a heated two-camp debate that reveals just how blurry the line can be between everyday household tools.

The object itself is modest—transparent blade, slightly curved down the center, rounded at the top, and capped with a short gold-toned ferrule. By the poster’s account, it’s smaller than a full ripe banana. No manufacturer’s label visible, no branding to settle the score. And that’s where things got messy. Half the crowd insisted it was a butter spreader, the other half championed the shoehorn theory. One commenter posted a confident verdict:“It’s a butter knife, OP,”while others fired back with equal certainty about the shoe-fitting function.

The resemblance between the two is genuinely uncanny. Shoehorns and butter spreaders share that same long, curved, tapered silhouette. Plastic versions appear in nearly identical shapes and sizes, making differentiation nearly impossible without context or a label. According to Silver Superstore, a butter spreader typically has a rounded end and a small cut-out in the blade that prevents bread from tearing and stops butter from sticking while spreading. The photographed object appears to match that description closely, but so does a standard plastic shoehorn.

Of course, not everyone took the debate seriously. One commenter offered a country-by-country breakdown of what the object might be used for:“In the U.S. it’s a butter spreader. In South America it’s a banana peeler and in France it’s a device to scrape your bum when finished. Just don’t forget to wash between countries.”The reply:“Oh my god I’m laughing so hard my stomach hurts!!”Another joked about the shoehorn angle:“Can confirm, not only does it ease the whole putting-shoes-on process, but I also quite enjoy the squish between my toes.”

By the end of the thread, the consensus leaned toward butter spreader—but the debate never fully closed. And maybe that’s the real fun here. Without definitive proof, the mystery becomes a Rorschach test for household objects. What one person sees as spreading jam, another sees as easing shoes. No manufacturer’s label, no certainty. Just a transparent plastic tool, a photo, and the internet doing what it does best: arguing about something nobody will ever actually resolve.