Play-Doh Day

What the day is

Play-Doh Day is observed on September 16, marking the modeling compound that was invented to do something else entirely.

Origin and background

The company that made it was a Cincinnati soap firm producing a soft, pliable putty for cleaning wallpaper. Homes heated by coal accumulated a film of soot on the walls, and wallpaper of the period could not be washed, so the putty was rolled over the surface to lift the dirt away. It sold steadily for years.

Then the market evaporated. Households switched to oil and gas heating, soot stopped accumulating, and washable vinyl wallpaper arrived at about the same time. The product had no purpose left and the company was in serious trouble.

The rescue came from a relative of the owners who taught nursery school and had been using the cleaning putty in class, because modeling clay was too stiff for small hands. The compound was reworked, colored, given a new name and relaunched in the mid-1950s, first through department stores and then, decisively, through children's television.

The formula has never been complicated. It is essentially flour, water, salt and a borate, with the salt doing much of the preservative work, which is why homemade versions using pantry ingredients behave almost identically and why the commercial product is famously unpleasant to taste.

The smell is the genuinely unusual part. It is deliberate and unchanged for decades, and in 2018 the company registered the scent itself as a trademark in the United States, describing it in words on the application. Registered scent marks are rare, because a smell has to be shown to identify a source rather than being a natural property of the goods.

How to take part

• Make a batch with flour, salt, water and oil. It takes about ten minutes.
• Keep it airtight. Drying out is the only thing that kills it.
• Give children the plain colors and let them mix, briefly.
• Read the trademark filing, which tries to describe a smell in words.