Most of the loofahs that we purchase, suck. Anyone who has used one repeatedly knows that, eventually, they start to unravel and fall apart. I’ve gone through a half dozen of those little buggers because they’ve literally disintegrated into a long, useless hose of loofah material, especially under heavy usage. I need to exfoliate damnit!

Project:
Improve the “structural integrity” of the loofah in order to prevent unraveling. This is a very simple project that requires no tools, and only 10 minutes of your time (tops). We’re going to take the loofah apart and reassemble it in a more durable way.

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Step 1: Get your loofah. I just finished cleaning mine with some bleach (which everyone should do every 1-2 weeks to kill bacteria), so there’s some water in it.

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Step 2: Remove the plastic hat. There’s a little plastic hat that covers up the loop holding the loofah together. Remove this by sliding it up and off of the loop. It might take some heaving since the plastic digs into the string, but it’ll come off – I promise.

When you’re done, you’ll be left with a little lasso-like loop where the string is channeled through itself. Like so:

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Step 3: Undo the loop that holds the loofah together. It should be as easy as pulling the end of the string out from itself, resulting in a single ring of string and a pile of loofah guts.

Our poor, useless loofah:

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Step 4: Break the current string at the glue-point, making it a line of string instead of a loop. Most loofahs have a bit of glue to bind the two ends of the string together. Exercise some firm tugging, or some scissors, at the point where it’s glued to break it.

Our lonely string:

Glue point:

Broken string:

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Step 5: Gather the loofah “hose” up into a loofah ring/cylinder. You’ll notice upon closer examination that our loofah material is actually a tube. We need to gather it up tightly. I’ve found the easiest method to be putting your hand in the tube and pulling it onto your arm like the sleeve of a shirt, and then bunching all of it into a compact ring or cylinder of loofah. It’ll end up looking like a legwarmer – just a really unwarming one.

Loofah guts:

Gathered up and bunched together around my wrist/hand:

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Step 6: Run the string through the loofah “legwarmer” and tie it tightly. This is the last step. I had to use both hands to do this so I don’t have a good picture. In light of that, I’ve made a really crappy drawing to both nauseate and educate you.

The gameplan is to use the string to make a figure 8 shape through the loofah, as shown below. The drawing shows the loofah cylinder with the opening facing up. The black bit is the string, and the dashed line is meant to show where the string goes through the middle of the loofah.

The strings should be even when they meet up, and I recommend bringing them together and on the side (as shown above). Once you’re here, tie the two ends in the same way that you’re start tying a shoe – where you loop one end over, under, and through the other. Then pull it really tight so it cinches the entire loofah together in a nice, fluffy ball.

If you pull it tight enough you probably won’t be able to see the string anywhere except there you have it tied – this is good. Now do the over, under, and through bit once more to create a knot. I usually tie a few extra knots, for insurance, and then tie another knot at the end of the string for easy hanging. See below:

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That’s it! You’re finished; nice job if you made it through this thing. Of course, the real payoff comes when you’re using your new, improved loofah time and again without fear of it falling apart because of spirited scrubbing. Thanks!

jf@vbldw