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About this tool
Estimate how much shampoo, toothpaste, sunscreen and cream a trip needs, sized into travel bottles and checked against the 1 litre cabin bag.
The Toiletry Quantity Estimator turns trip length and daily habits into millilitres, then into the travel bottles you actually have to buy, using published dose figures rather than guesswork: about 20 ml of shampoo per wash for medium hair, 1 g of toothpaste per brushing, 15 ml of sunscreen to cover face, neck, arms and lower legs at the 2 mg/cm² dose, and roughly 20 ml of lotion for a whole adult body measured in fingertip units. It then totals the container sizes — not the contents — against the 1 litre cabin liquids bag, because that is what security actually assesses.
Open Toiletry Quantity Estimator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Pick a Hair length - Short at 10 ml a wash, Medium at 20 ml or Long at 30 ml - and enter Trip length (days), Hair washes per week, Showers per day, Teeth brushings per day, Sunscreen applications per day, Shaves per week and Hand sanitiser uses per day.
Under 'What else you use', tick Conditioner, Face moisturiser, 'Cleanser or micellar water', Roll-on deodorant, Body lotion and Contact lens solution.
'Bottles in the liquids bag' totals container capacity against the 1000 ml bag and reports the ml free or over, while the 'Item by item' table gives per-use dose, uses, ml needed and the bottle count, flagging anything over 100 ml; Copy list copies the checklist.
Each figure is a published or measured single-use dose, shown per use so you can adjust it.
Rounds each item up to the smallest travel size that holds it, and splits anything over 100 ml.
Totals container capacity rather than contents, which is the actual test at the scanner.
Roughly 10 ml a wash for short hair, 20 ml for medium and 30 ml for long. Four washes over a week therefore comes to 40-120 ml, so medium and long hair both need a full 100 ml travel bottle rather than a 50 ml one.
About 1 g per brushing in normal adult use, so two brushings a day for a week is around 14 g — a 30 ml travel tube covers it easily. Dental guidance is actually a pea-sized amount, roughly 0.25 g for an adult and a smear for children under three, so this estimate is generous rather than tight.
About 15 ml per application for face, neck, arms and lower legs, or 30 ml for a full adult body, reapplied every two hours. Two applications a day for a week is 210 ml, which the 100 ml container limit forces into three bottles — one of the fastest ways to fill the cabin liquids bag.
Yes. The rule is on the container's stated capacity, not on how much is left inside, so a 150 ml bottle with 40 ml in it is still refused at the scanner. Decant into travel bottles of 100 ml or less, or switch to solid formats, which fall outside the liquids rule altogether.