It’s about as common and mundane of an object as they come, but it also happens to have a trick or two up its rubbery sleeve: We’re talking about the eraser, the two-sided classroom staple that claims to remove both pencil AND pen. You know which ones we’re referring to, right? One side is pink, the other is blue, and they remove lead and ink, respectively. Sometimes, the blue side does nothing more than rip your paper (one of the leading causes of elementary school stress). As it turns out, there’s a reason for that — and it all centers around the fact that we’ve been misunderstanding the original purpose of the two-sided eraser for the entire time we’ve been using them. This information might not be life-changing, but it’s little-know (and totally fun) trivia nonetheless. Find out the truth about those pesky, paper-ripping erasers below. Once you realize the truth, make sure to tell your kids before the school year starts.The soft pink or red end is thought to be used for pencils, while the other is assumed to erase pen. As it turns out, that’s not exactly accurate.
Lighter paper tears more easily, while grainy art paper make pencil more difficult to remove. Hence, the blue side of the eraser was born.
Someone has some serious explaining to do, because we seriously thought that blue side was for pen.
Though the blue end was meant for erasing pencil marks on heavy grades of paper, but it also happened to erase pen marks.
We all know that in certain situations, that darn blue eraser can leave your paper looking less like a paper, and more like this.
It explains a lot — now if we could only find an eraser that actually works backwards like this one, we’d be all set.
