Perhaps it’s all the gorgeous festival beauty looks on our Pinterest feeds, but lately we’ve had the urge to go full-on cotton candy with our locks. There’s something about pastel-hued, hair-chalked strands that speaks to our inner wild child—and we’ll be honest, the lack of commitment makes them even more appealing. But with new formulas springing up left and right, how are you supposed to know how to use (and more importantly, remove the remnants of) each one? We did the research for you, and found out exactly how to apply and wash out each type of hair chalk, leaving you more time to fishtail and dip-dye to your heart’s content.
Liquid hair chalk lasts anywhere from 2-10 shampoos. It will usually come with a sponge-tipped or foam applicator. To apply, place a towel over your shoulders and put on gloves to prevent staining your clothes and hands. Next, use the applicator to apply the formula to your locks. wait 30 seconds for product to absorb fully, then blow-dry with a styling brush. To remove it, you're supposed to just wash your hair as you would normally. However, you can also massage a hair oil like Sachajuan's Intensive Hair Oil ($33) into your strands before shampooing and conditioning, in order to speed up the removal process.
A hair chalk compact can be used on wet or dry hair, but applying to wet hair will give you a more intense color. Take a one-inch section of hair and slide the hair chalk compact over the length you’d like to color. Seal the pigment in with a spritz of hairspray. Depending on how light your hair is, it'll last one to three shampoos to get it out of your hair. Hair chalk that comes in a compact will usually wash out quickly and easily with shampoo, though blondes may have to shampoo a few times more to rinse out all of the pigment.
The traditional hair chalk pen can be used on wet or dry hair, and lasts from 2-4 shampoos, depending on how light your hair is. Place a towel on your shoulders and use gloves to prevent staining. If you're brunette, wet the section of hair you’d like to color before applying the chalk. Blondes can do that too, but it'll make the pigment stay on much longer. Apply the chalk to the strand of hair you'd like to color, twisting the hair into itself as you go. Allow for the color to dry, or just give it a cool blast of air with your hairdryer. Style as usual, but if you want to lock in the color, finish it with hairspray. It can be removed with normal shampoo, but a clarifying shampoo (like Verb's Reset, $16) will rinse it out quick.
Hair chalk spray is likely the easiest to use, because you just spray it on dry hair right before going out. It typically only lasts a few shampoos, but that also means it's super easy to get out of your hair. Just mist the color directly on your hair, wherever you would like a pop of color, and style it like normal.
Markers, or felt-tip pens, serve a variety of functions. Children use them to make bright, colorful drawings. The stereotypical teacher uses a glaring, unmistakable red felt-tip to grade papers. Retail employees, roadside vendors, performers, and protestors rely on the indelible, eye-catching shades and thick inking surface of these writing and drawing utensils to announce sales, prices, and productions, or to create strongly worded posterboard signs to convey dissatisfaction. Markers are also useful for permanently marking surfaces, which is often necessary for identification purposes—putting names on clothing tags, boxes, and tape which can be adhered to almost any item.
The marker body, cap, and plugs are formed from plastic resin. The marker reservoir, which holds the ink, is formed from polyester. Powder and water are used to form the felt writing tip. In addition, markers require ink, and the pigments and synthetic substances used to make it. Toluol and xylol used to be common synthetics used as solvents in dye, but due to their toxic nature these substances have largely been replaced with safer chemicals such as cyclic alkylene carbonates, although these chemicals are still used to make the indelible ink contained in permanent markers. The solvent is the substance into which the dye is diluted. Water also acts as a solvent in ink. Additives may also be used in an ink mixture to act as wetting agents.
3 To make the body of the marker, plastic resin is injection-molded into a marker body. Injection molding involves heating a substance, in this case plastic resin, into a molten state and forcing (injecting) it into a mold of the desired shape, then allowing it to cool and harden. Marker caps and plugs are formed in the same manner as the barrel.
4 The nib, or tip, of the marker is made from powder which is mixed with water, molded, and baked into its pointed or flat form.
5 Using one machine for all the following functions, an assembler then places a polyester cylinder inside the marker barrel to form a reservoir for the ink, fills the reservoir with ink, and inserts the nib at the bottom and the cap at the top.
6 The markers are then placed into color assortment and packaged for retail marketing.
The highlighter’s appeal has flourished in the digital age. Most word-processing and e-reader software products have a highlighter function. And the hand-held highlighter continues to evolve, too. In the early ’80s, the fiber tip gave way to polyethylene beads molded into porous heads. (The plastic squeaks less, and the ink flows more smoothly.) When the highlighter business saw that it wasn’t being embraced by holdouts who preferred pens, it made the dual highlighter/pen. There are now retractable highlighters. And flat ones. And ones that smell like pizza.
Due to the thin paper used in most Bibles, typical highlighters often bleed through. For that reason, G.T. Luscombe, a distributor of Bible-study accessories based in Frankfort, Ill., got into the business of Bible-paper-friendly highlighters. John Luscombe, the president and chief executive, explains:
Is there a particular color code? There are different types of coding depending on how many colors there are. But for the most common four colors, we recommend that yellow represents blessings, blue represents the Holy Spirit, pink represents salvation and green represents growth and new life.
With so many paint colours available and new ranges being released every week, which paint set should you buy when you first start painting?
The overwhelming feeling that descends when trying to buy paint colours either online or in your local art store can often lead to the safe bet…
The pre-boxed starter set.
The paint companies have designed them to help you, right? The best paints fo