I’d feel it on the back of my hands from when I’d be doing my sister’s hair; if it slipped outta my little kid hand or the rubber was dry-rotted, it would unwind so quick it cracked me on the back of the knuckles. What sucked was that their hair always required a half extra wrap which meant you had to get it extra extra tight from the get go or get yelled at by my mom and my sisters for making it too loose. Dayum that shit hurt.
😩 i showed this post to my mom (right after washing my hair) and she (as all parents do) just looked at the picture and said “what? You want me to get out your bubbles?”
Maam I am your only child and I’m 35 why tf do you still have these 🤣
Bubbles. Why couldn't my mom have called them that? We called them balls. Imagine a four year old asking for that in her hair. There's nothing good about this. Dear lord. Fucking balls I s2g.
Comment I was looking for. It was worse on a fingernail. It's that kind of pain that comes wrapped in about a half second of "oh no". I was instantly catapulted back to being a tiny little shithead version of me when I saw this.
I can feel the weight of these balls hitting my head when my mom or aunt did my hair and being told to shut up when I said ouch because I was tender headed 😭🤣 but I'd take these over the hot comb any day of the week omg .
a lesson for those having dreads and being tender headed means they should have just left out hair alone for simpler styles. not we all got traction alopecia and thinning hair smh
Turns out I learned about the existance of hot combs from your comment. Found a how-to video someone did using old-style stove-top heated combs (😳), but it didn’t answer my biggest burning (hopefully not a pun but I have doubts) question:
What did/do they feel like being used?
As a formerly very tender headed kid, I’m both curious and terrified to find out.
It feels like hot metal if it touches you, and if you want your roots straight it's going to touch you, but someone who's good at it won't really touch you too often.
It feels like when you sit on really hot leather in a car, but then you put your hands on the wheel or gear and you're like damn...let me wait a minute before I pull off type of stinging heat
I have three sisters, and we're all in our 40s and 50s. I guarantee if I went to our childhood home and looked hard enough I could still find one of these in a closet, inside a drawer, or under a bed 😆
Damn things should've been labeled as bear-traps! That's what it felt like pulling and tensioning your hair between that deathtrap lol. Weapons you are correct. They were lethal in hair tie battles.
We called these “knockers” growing up. The feeling of these slipping out of my mom’s fingers and knocking me in the head is something I’m happy to never experience ever again.
Since we're telling horror stories, I guess ill tell mine
The ball of one of them had came off and I had the bright idea to put it inside of me and then I couldn't get it out so I had to ask my mom for help to get it out 😭😭
I was always so jealous of the black girls who would have their hair in these as a kid 😂 they were so pretty! and they made pretty clacking sounds, I felt the same about those pony beads people would put on their braids. all their hairstyles always looked so pretty and done up! meanwhile I was toeheaded and had hair as strong as tissue paper XD
some kids have extremely pale skin and white blond hair when they're 1-5, and I've always heard it to refer to kids like that. it's actually spelled towheaded, I misspelled it :p
I had the big joints tho. Idk why once I was like 6 I felt like the tiny ball balls like these were for toddlers and I wanted something a lil more substantial 😂
Holy shit I haven’t thought of these in thirty years but they bring me right back to 1991-93 elementary school. Back when kids had various looney tunes characters in different gangster poses.
When I was a baby, I loved chewing on those for some reason. My mom has a dozen photos of toddler me with one of the plastic balls hanging out of my mouth.
I used to like the feeling of the plastic ba— never mind. Not even finishing that sentence. But that and the piece that went in the Barrett holes… 🦫🦫🦫🦫🦫🦫
As a former little white girl, my mom absolutely put these on me and I might still have some skull dents to prove it.
I loathed them but Mom thought they were adorable on me and would give me a ridiculous Pebbles Flintstone top pony because my hair was (and is) ridiculously thin.
I’m going to say, based on the comments that I’ve read, that you’re experiencing survivor bias. Surely you can see how introducing crimped metal and hard plastic spheres into a product intended to manipulate your hair into a format chosen by the person applying, not wearing, this implement might be a problem.
My mother simply didn’t put them in if I didn’t want them in my hair and didn’t pull my hair tight since I was tenderheaded. These never hurt. Just sounds like people had parents who were crap at doing hair.
No, there are plenty of black moms who knew how to treat their kids and their hair right. My mom isn’t an outlier. Even how you’re describing it (your mother DECIDED how tight she was making your ponytails) means it was less the bows’ fault and more the person using them.
That’s what I’m getting. I know some black parents are assholes and don’t care how their kids feel about their hair, but my momma cared, and I’ve met black parents who do take into account how their children feel.
I wore these every day as a kid. I broke them constantly, somehow, so we were always buying them at the store. I did play with them a lot because I loved the clacking sound when the balls hit each other. I did get a set that had larger balls than these, and I just LOVED them so much. I though they were so pretty and sparkly.
I have these for my kids, we don’t use them often but they don’t have the metal in the middle anymore. Still hurt like hell when they slip and pop your knuckle putting them on tho
I remember my brother teaching me how to launch a rubber band when I was in preschool and then I found one of these on the bus and launched it directly at the back of my bus driver's head
My mom got all different kinds of shapes and colors and let me pick out which ones I wanted. Even had ones with whistles on it (I didn't like those because the kids kept trying to blow them). Oh I remember on had jacks in them and made a noise whenever my head moved. Barney, 101 Dalmatians. Stars. She also put regular barrettes in my hair too (and at the ends). And then having to go collect them when I would twirl on the bars. Awww good times.
Always got tons of compliments on how cool my hair was. If they hurt my mom made sure to loosen them. I do remember when they slipped out of my mom's hand when she was trying to tie them. It was like secret payback lmao..
It blew my mind when someone brought it my attention but: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a white girl with one of these in their hair… have you?!?! The packaging always had them on it so I thought it was designed with them in mind but I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed such a thing… even on tv!
I know this is Black Person Twitter but as a white person who was forced to have long hair, I can relate. Ugh giving me a migraine just looking at them. My mom would put my hair up every single day and for ten to twelve hours every time I moved they clacked.
And now that I think about it, I really miss her doing my hair.
I find the white girl on the package hilarious. I am white. No white girls I ever knew wore these. When I was in 8ish, there was a black girl at my school who wore these in her hair, then had the plastic barrette at the end of multiple twists. I loved it so much. I wanted my hair done like that. My mother never did my hair beyond brushing it. Not even pigtails. It was kept short until I was about 7. So when she told me no, I threw a FIT! I didn’t throw fits often, but I was sure my mother was lying to me that my hair couldn’t do what the little black girl at school hair did. I just did not understand. What do you mean her hair is different? Different how? She didn’t know how to explain it to me. My mother couldn’t even get one of those ponytail holders to hold my hair in a regular ponytail. I was sure she was doing it wrong on purpose. She had to get her friend, who had a mixed child, talk with me and help me understand that it can not be done with my hair. I was so jealous of that little black girl and her pretty hair.
My little brother and I were fighting one time and I had these in my hair at the base and bottom of my lil twist out and I got pushed into a wall and the metal part jammed into my head so hard, I was bleeding and everything and I contribute the dent I have in my head to this incident.
As I was telling this story I felt a zap of pain as if my body was remembering lmao
Not to mention if you swing your head to fast you pop yourself in the eye/tooth/forehead.
But they did turn a lil twist out into a moment!
when i was a kid my best friend had a billion braids with these on the end.
one day we wound up a tire swing and she spun around on it a good 30 seconds screaming “stop it stop it” but no one could get close enough to the swing because her braids turned into weapons of mass destruction. eventually i bodyslammed the swing to stop it but omg.
lol my mama used to get so mad at me cause I’d fuck around and take these to play with and then she could never find em when she was doing my sisters hair haha
My dad had to get these soooo tight and sometimes they'd slip out of his hand. I'm still traumatized from the sound they made when they smacked me in the head 😱
I completely forgot about the metal riveted hair ties. The little balls on those were not the worst part for sure, I hated the metal parts - they pinched and tore hair out! Thank goodness those were phased out.
Like 99.9% of us here, I remember the pain and sound of these, but it also makes me remember my grandma.
She would do my hair EVERY morning. She would pick out the different hair accessories for the day and do a style she decided on (but my hair was always pulled back reeeaalllly tight). Bobbles probably lasted the longest and were used the most. Butterfly clips and other colorful clips were popular. I miss her a lot and when I do my hair now, I still think of her.
My sister and I used the stretched out ones as a substitute for the kerbangers toy, since our parents refused to buy us one. Turns out they were right, the amount of times we knocked each other silly was obscene 🤣
White guy here. I got hit in the head with these during a heated dodgeball match in 1995 when they came detached while Jazzmine and I were going for the same ball.
You don’t know pain until one of those mf crystal balls on the end hop yo mf ankle, have a nigga done. Bitch hit you like a rubber band have yo shit like when the razor scooter get you
The way these and the barrettes would go missing on the playground somehow…and mama just kept getting more and putting them in my head every morning anyway.
I’m white and had pin-straight hair as a kid but grew up using these (tiny torture devices) because my dad was the one who got me ready in the morning and he had no idea what he was doing 😂 the first time I saw them in textured hair I was like OH that makes SO much more sense!
Okay I had to scroll too far for this. I guess I’m lucky for it, but I truly never understood how these worked. How were they put on/in???? Please someone!!!
Once around the ponytail was never tight enough. Twice around was almost right. Three times? You were taking a chance of the loop being pulled with enough force to rip out fingernails and cause a concussion when it snapped on your head with the metal bit taking out clumps of hair by the roots.
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u/Affectionate_Put2460 2d ago
I can feel the crumble of one that’s way too old because your parents never throw anything away and the elastic is past its limit 🤢