Review (5/5): Unique Hair Toy
I've never seen anything quite like this invisibobble hair toy before. It's a completey new approach for curly-cord scrunchies since you put them on the same way you would put a twist-tie on. Wrap it around your hair and twist the two beads together to lock it into place. Then untwist the beads later to remove it.
The beads are nice and smooth and the curly cord is tightly wound and firmly attached to each bead, yet quite flexible. My beads are pink, which I adore, but I can already tell that I'd love to have them in lots of colors or designs.
The whole thing is smaller than I thought it would be. For some reason, I thought it would be about the size of those figure-8 ponytail holders with a bead at each end that we used to wear when we were little. It's much smaller than those. It's 2.5 inches (6.35 centimeters) from end to end if I just lay it on a table. I managed to comfortably stretch it out to 7 inches (17.78 centimeters) and it could surely stretch more, but I didn't want to force it.
2.5 inches isn't very much when it comes to wrapping it around the base of a pony tail or braid, though, so you'll most likely need to stretch it to put it on. That's a bit tricky to get the hang of, but you can mess around with it on someone else's hair or the ends of your hair if it's long or on a few strands from your mop or a twisted-up handkerchief or anything soft you can wrap it around. Once you get a feel for how to work it, you can use it in your hair.
It's designed to only need to wrap around your hair once, so it doesn't need to be very long. That said, I'd love a much longer one that I can wrap around my ponytail several times. That would make it so I could wrap it around the base of my bun as well, which would be a very cute look. I suppose you could get creative and twist several of these together to form a longer one with lots of beads along it. That would be extra cute, because you'd end up with several beads around your pony tail or bun.
In looking at it, I worried that it would eventually stretch out and no longer work, but apparently the company already thought of that and it's not an issue. If the cord stretches out, you can coil it tightly again simply by dropping the invisibobble into hot water for a few seconds or blowing on it with a blow dryer or setting it in the sun or dangling it above a heater. That's great news and encourages me to experiment with this thing and see how many ways I can figure out to use it.
Some folks have mentioned that these get tangled up in their hair while others have said they never tangle in their hair. I'm one of the people whose hair the invisibobble likes to get tangled up in. I suspect it has to do with whether your hair is straight or not. My hair has a bit of a wave to it, so it likes to grab onto (or be grabbed onto by) whatever it encounters. That said, if it gets tangled around your hair or if your hair gets tangled up around it, you can wiggle the cord to separate the coils and your hair will slide freely between them. Everything on the invisibobble is smooth, so you'll always be able to unwind or pull your hair out of it without pulling any of your hair out of your head or breaking any of it.
For those of you who get one and decide that it's not a hair toy you're comfortable using, it would make a great and very cute bag-tie or you could use it as a cord-keeper for cell-phone cords, etc. It has the added advantage in that you can put it on and take itthem off with one hand, freeing up your other hand to hold the coiled-up cord that you're managing. Not only that, but if you use it as a cord-keeper and want to use the cord, you can untwist the invisibobble, unwind the cord, and twist the invisibobble right back onto the cord, which will hang onto it for you until you need to put it away again. Then, all it will take is a quick untwist, coil, and twist to put the cord away.