Heathrow finally lets you keep your shampoo
After decades of liquid-related humiliation, Heathrow has upgraded its security scanners and—miracle of miracles—you can now keep your drinks, gadgets and dignity inside your bag.
Right. Picture the scene.
You arrive at Heathrow at some unspeakable hour, clutching a half-awake coffee and a small mountain of resentment. Ahead of you is airport security: that ritual humiliation where you are ordered to unpack your life into plastic trays while a stranger examines your shampoo like it’s a suspicious chemical weapon. For years, this has been Britain’s most reliable way of turning calm adults into twitchy raccoons.
But now—brace yourself—Heathrow has finally stopped being ridiculous.
After years of promises, delays, reversals, re-reversals and the occasional governmental shrug, Britain’s biggest airport has rolled out shiny new CT scanners across all terminals. And what this means, in simple terms, is this: you can keep your liquids in your bag. Proper liquids. Up to two litres. Shampoo the size of a fire extinguisher. Also laptops. Also tablets. Also your dignity.
No more fishing out electronics like a desperate trawler. No more wrestling with those infernal plastic bags that split the moment you look at them. No more standing there, shoeless and broken, while a man with a badge sighs at your toothpaste.
Heathrow is now the biggest airport on Earth to have fully embraced this sorcery, beating rivals who’ve been flirting with it for years but never quite committing. Gatwick, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol and Belfast have all dabbled, but Heathrow has gone all in, like a man who’s finally realised that fax machines are not the future.
The scanners themselves are allegedly so clever they can peer into your bag with the precision of a submarine periscope, processing thousands of passengers an hour while still spotting anything naughty. Heathrow says this will mean less faffing, fewer queues, and more time for what really matters: overpaying for sandwiches and wondering if the gate number will ever appear.
And this is the real win. Time. Saved. Endless, soul-crushing minutes reclaimed from the void. No longer will families be reduced to tears as they repack their belongings like panicked hamsters. No longer will business travellers miss flights because their laptop has triggered a full-scale investigation involving latex gloves and a look that says, “This might get intimate.”
Yes, the dreaded secondary search. The one that always feels like it’s happening at dawn, whether it is or not. The one that makes you feel you’ve somehow offended a nation. These new scanners promise fewer of those. Fewer rubber gloves. Fewer stern silences. Fewer moments where you wonder if flying was a mistake and perhaps cycling to Madrid would’ve been simpler.
Of course, being Britain, the journey here has been about as smooth as a Land Rover on a ploughed field. Boris Johnson promised in 2019 that the 100ml nonsense would be gone by 2022. Then the pandemic arrived and everyone forgot how airports worked. In 2022, the government promised the “biggest shake-up in decades” by June 2024. Then June 2024 arrived, looked around, and quietly left.
Some airports installed the scanners early and dropped the rules—only to be told, on Friday the 13th no less, to put them back again. Even the EU joined the confusion conga. For a while, the official advice was essentially: “Assume nothing. Trust no one. Fear moisturiser.”
But now, finally, Heathrow has landed the plane.
There is a caveat, of course, because there’s always a caveat. This glorious freedom applies only when you’re leaving Heathrow. Coming back? Check the rules, because elsewhere you may once again be treated like a criminal mastermind armed with conditioner.
Still. Progress.
For the first time in decades, the airport experience might be marginally less awful. And that, frankly, is revolutionary.
