#9 -- Put glue on my nose

Well, at least on purpose. I guess I've had lots of opportunity to have glue on my nose in the past: all the way from playing with those nasty honey-looking glue bottles as a kindergartner, all the way up to accidental transfer when trying to seal the cracks in the foundation of my condo with Liquid Nails. But no, this time I actually, purposefully, gleefully, put glue on my nose. It was the traditional white kind, what most people call Elmer's glue.

You remember that stuff don't you? In third grade the kids used to put it on their hands and rub it around, then let it dry and peel it off like dead skin. They all thought it was so cool. And our teachers, obviously, thought that it was a complete waste of school resources. Plenty of my friends got after-school detention for wasting the good-old Elmer's glue in that fashion.

I don't think that my third grade teachers would have been any more impressed by my use of the glue in this case.

So, a few weeks ago, my wife told me that she read on the internet that if you put Elmer's glue on your nose and let it dry that it would act like a Biore strip and pull the black heads out of your skin. Don't think that this was the first time that I had heard of this substitution, but I thought, great! My nose is the one part of my body that totally grosses me out because of the sheer capacity of volume that it contains for housing blackheads. She did the whole glue-on-the-nose thing for a couple of nights, and so I figured that I might as well try it out as well.

Thus, I found myself rubbing a generous portion of white Elmer's glue onto my nose and then sitting down to watch a new episode of Lost. That hour flew by, and afterwards I got up and retired to the bathroom to pull the dried glue "skin" off of my nose and see the results.

Well, I have to say that it looked like the glue-facial did do something. I couldn't tell though if it actually pulled any blackheads out of the skin or if it just pulled all of the hair out. It definitely DID do the latter, but the former was never clear. I think that in order to make an actual determination I'd have to repeat the experiment.

As such, during my last visit to Wal-mart I picked up a small box of Biore strips. I figured it was all in the way of science, so dishing out nearly seven dollars for the eight (six--with two for free!!) strips was somewhat justified despite my continuing status as a "poor college student." I was definitely not disappointed with the real deal.

The two "free" strips that I found in the box were Mandarin-something scented and so I grabbed one of those, followed the instructions, and slapped it onto my nose. Unfortunately, I guess my nose is somewhat longer than the average nose because the strip only extended part of the way down to the tip. A minor annoyance in that the tip of my nose could be construed as being the biggest collector of blackheads. Ah well. Despite this fact, after applying the strip, I sat down at the table and transfered all of the story ideas that I had gotten over the past week (written on random pieces of paper and shoved into the pockets of my shorts up until that time) to my official "Story-idea Notebook." I was very proud of my work, and afterward removed the Biore strip from my nose, which didn't come off as easy as the glue, let me tell you. Ouch.

The strip took even more of the hair from my nose (miniscule, white, and nearly invisible unless they are sticking out from a hardened Biore strip), hair which I didn't even know that I had up until that point. BUT, it also took out an amazing amount of the smaller blackheads that had before been littering my nose with their general existence. This was quite obvious. Ha, ha! Alas, the big ones remained. I figure I'll try a few more strips and see if any difference is made with repetition.

In the end, I think that I decided that the glue-on-the-nose thing doesn't really work except as a cheap "wax-job." The real Biore strips seem to do a decent job. And yet, after all of this, I'm still left with the big, ugly, blackhead riddled nose of my yesterdays. Now, my wife has bought some fancy exfoliating skin treatment stuff from Mary Kay and has suggested that I try that. I don't know if I'd go so far as to actually put Mary Kay stuff on my face. I am a man after all. And I might just get laughed out of the Man Club for thinking such a thing. Blackheads it is then.

Edit(10 Aug 2010): I noted today--with some hilarity--this comic and realized that I wasn't alone. http://xkcd.com/777/