This Oddly Satisfying Video On Reddit Will Change How You Look At Donuts

Sometimes, the internet shows us something that makes us wonder, "How did we not know that?" Like the fact that magenta isn't a real color, or that you can find an image of two people sharing chips and salsa within the "Tostitos" printed on a bag of the tortilla chips (via BuzzFeed). Also, this: Donuts aren't round. Certain mass-produced yeast donuts, in any case, have six sides, as a video posted recently to Reddit shows. "Doughnuts start out at hexagons?!!!" one cearly perturbed Redditor commented. "My whole life is a lie."

Round food might be more visually appealing than hexagonal food — Redditors made more than one joke about how the edgy-looking donuts in the video were just like the nuts you find in the hardware store. Fear not, lovers of round doughnuts. As the yeast causes the dough to rise before it's fried, it usually loses a lot of its hexagonal shape and looks fairly round by the time it lands on your plate. (As a separate Reddit post shows, however, at least one donut shop must rush its cut dough into the fryer, so its donuts don't have the time to lose their six-sided shape.)

Raw dough is cut into hexagonal shapes to make donuts, with a machine or a special, hand-held roller (via YouTube), for the same reason bees make hexagonal honeycombs. Hexagons are the shape with the least waste.

A Merced, California shop called Donut King's posted a demonstration on YouTube of the hand-held hexagonal donut cutter. The video explains that cutting dough into hexagons for making doughnuts has two major advantages. For one, it's a big time saver, taking about one third the time it takes to cut dough into circles. Secondly, the hexagonal pattern cut into the dough leaves little waste, so you get more doughnuts out of each batch of rolled-out dough.

The added efficiency must be worth it. The person behind the camera in the Donut King's video said that rolling cutter, which was about as big as a bread box, cost almost as much as a stereo system. In the end, the hexagon might deserve credit for enabling your local shop to charge you a few pennies less for your favorite donut. Hexagons taste the same as circles, after all.

Still, some people can't get over all that pointiness. "This annoys the s*** out of me and I have no idea why," one Redditor said. "I'd eat them. They look good. So why do I want to table flip them?" Another commenter on Reddit agreed: "I don't care if it's more efficient or whatever," they said. "This is just pure sacrilege."