We recently obtained three examples of toys that expand in water. Have you ever had one of these? Do they work as advertised? Let’s see…
First was this shell that contained a cute anime mermaid! Here’s the instructions, handily translated by google:
Couldn’t be easier: submerge the shell in water and wait a few days. So we did, and here’s what happened:
That’s about 72 hours in those photos (and the weird lighting is because our kitchen light broke in the middle). As you can see it worked exactly as advertised, however the… creature that birthed from the shell is quite different from the packaging!
Oh well, maybe this one will be better:
What’s this? A Gudetama comes out of the shell and there’s a chance for a gold one?!! What do the instructions say:
Oh my god there seems to be a clause that requires the user to kill themselves – by hand no less – if something unexpected happens! It also seems to suggest we’d need 81 containers of water and there was something about mold collapsing! It was with no small trepidation therefore that we submerged the egg and waited a few days:
And out popped Gudetama! This one also worked exactly as advertised and the reward was much better than the weird mermaid. He was bigger than the egg as well, so he definitely grew.
If you’ve had one of these you know the instructions say if you dry them out they’ll return to their shrunken size and can be grown over and over. While it’s true they shrink, it’s never to the original size. After a week out of water for instance the (cute anime) mermaid would never fit back into her shell:
We even had a third one, which came as a Christmas gift:
Up to four times his size you say? I’ll spare the montage of growing photos, since it’s hard to appreciate the difference, and instead present this pair of photos:
On the left is immediately before the water, and on the right is after about five days of soaking. Four times the size? I’ll let you be the judge 🙂