How to Remove Silly Putty from Your Kid’s Hair

When sharing parenting tips here, I’d rather be talking about things like how to instill a love for reading or how we can teach life lessons through tasks that need doing. But alas, as parents we sometimes have more pressing concerns than helping our children appreciate Shakespeare. For instance, we might have a strong need to figure out how to remove silly putty from your kid’s hair. Well, I’m now able to offer some sage advice on this topic, too.

Tip # 1: Don’t let your kid put silly putty in his hair.

So, if you’ve started reading this post out of simple curiosity at the title, and have never had to contend with this issue–congratulations! Hopefully you will never need this advice.

But if you’ve Googled this query because you are in the predicament B & I were in recently, let me help you out. When we first realized there was a melted, gooey red mess in my son’s hair (a ball of silly putty had been left in his baseball cap, which he then proceeded to wear while hiking on a hot day), I thought it might come out by simply washing his hair normally. Nope. Seemed to just work it in more.

After seeing how stubborn the silly putty was when I first tried to wash it out, I thought we might need to go in the direction of a wiffle hair cut, removing all the problem hair. That was actually a popular suggestion in my web research. Other creative ideas included WD40 (really, WD40?!?) and peanut butter (that would have to be soynut butter in our house). The idea of using hand sanitizer and or conditioner seemed a bit more practical, and that’s what we did.

I started by using hand sanitizer, but I found the conditioner worked a little better. Either way, the method is basically the same. Take a good, healthy amount of the conditioner and work it into the silly puttied hair. Then start combing, combing some more, and then comb for a bit longer.  Work in some more conditioner, comb some more. It might be a bit painful at first, at which time you might remind of the alternative, which is cutting off all their hair.     The conditioner and the combing eventually loosens up the silly putty and you will gradually see it coming out. It took us about 10 minutes of vigorous combing and re-application of the conditioner to get it out. Then you are ready to do a thorough hair washing to get the remaining gunk out. And then, voila, good as new!

Optional final step: when the silly putty has been removed and washed out, declare it is 5 o’clock somewhere and pour your adult beverage of choice.