Wednesday, January 25, 2017

How to get Blue Tack (Blu-Tack) out of Your Hair

I don't usually do a lot of fashion and beauty tips on this blog, but I had the opportunity of conducting some research this afternoon, and I figured it would be a pity to let my newfound knowledge go to waste.
After all, somebody out there in Internetland may one day find themselves in the same predicament, and may find this information useful.

To answer the obvious question--how did I get blue tack in my hair in the first place?--I'm not really sure.  There's always tons of blue-tack around the teachers' office.  I remember absent-mindedly fiddling around with it in the morning.  Perhaps I touched my hair with it still on my fingers.  Or maybe it was on the headphones on the communal work computers.

At any rate, somewhere in the course of the day I noticed there was a lump of something in my hair.  I initially thought it was a seed or a burr or something, and tried to just pull it out, but only succeeded in mashing it into my hair farther.  (I'm overdue for a haircut at the moment, so I'm in one of my long-hair stages).

At this point, it became impossible to pull it out without taking a good chunk of my hair with it.  So I thought I would just leave it alone until I got home and could try to shampoo it out.
Which meant the whole rest of the day, people were commenting "Did you know you have this big clump of blue tack in your hair?"  (Fortunately I wasn't teaching that day.  I was just in the office prepping).

Lots of people began offering their advice to me, and it turned out that this was not the first time this had happened at my school.  Which makes a certain degree of statistical sense, I suppose.  Hundreds of teachers, all of them handling blue-tack all day long-- it's like the million monkeys on the typewriters.  Sooner or later, the blue tack is going to get in people's hair.

One manager had a story of a teacher who was attacked by a kid, and had blue-tack thrown into her hair.  Her advice was not to shower or get the blue tack warm at all, but to freeze it with ice, and then peel it off.  (Apparently this is what they had done in that case.)

I, on the other hand, picked up advice on the Internet about using peanut butter or vegetable oil to get gum out of hair.

Long story short, I picked up some olive oil on the way home.  And it worked like magic.
Like it was the easiest thing in the world--I just put the olive oil onto the blue tack, and the blue tack just magically dissolved.  I didn't have to pull it out.  I didn't have to carefully comb it out.  It just dissolved into a blue liquid, and that was the job done.

It was so magically quick and painless, that I figured I post the advice on the Internet, so that the next teacher who gets into this predicament knows exactly what to do.

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