Crying isn’t fun, but we all get sad sometimes. The biggest problem is that it doesn’t actually solve anything.

After an altercation with her tutor, Dutch Design Academy graduate Yi-Fei Chen couldn’t keep herself from crying in public, something that made her feel ashamed. But the incident led her to come up with a quirky conceptual design project that will hopefully put a smile on your face.

The Tear Gun is a brass and plastic gun that captures the user’s tears from a silicon cup that’s attached to the head near the eyes. The liquid is piped into a small bottle where it gets frozen, and then loaded into the gun where the projectile can be fired.

At her graduation ceremony, Chen got to use the gun on her head of department — an opportunity she gladly took. The tear bullet luckily didn’t lead to any harm.

Even though the gun might not be able to physically hurt anyone, it does offers the owner a sense of emotional release when the trigger is pulled, and often that’s more than enough.

Eindhoven graduate designs a gun for firing her tears on Dezeen

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