Akin to money burning a hole in your pocket, I have vegetable oil burning a hole in my cupboard.  So today I decided to put this vegetable oil to good use. I googled "uses for vegetable oil" and tried to compile a comprehensive list of alleged uses for vegetable oil on the internet. I split these into two categories: things I could attempt (and did, don't worry), and things I couldn't. I came up with a third category: things I thought it could do, just for fun.

Things online that I tried:
- Shoe polish - Supposedly it makes your shoes all shiny. See below for a comparison:

Can't really say if it was successful or not. It looks about the same. Also, I'm not sure what this does to the long-term health of the leather either.

- Sticky lid prevention - I didn't have this issue with my honey given it was a flip top, but I tried it anyway in the spirit of the post. No issue before and nothing cropped up after. Effectiveness is unknown.

- "Repair" non-stick pots and pans - I was about to say that I didn't think my pans needed to be "repaired" but then I remembered that I still had my old pan from college. This thing survived with me since sophomore year and was warped from being doused with cold water as well as late nights feats of strength and valor. Honestly can't believe I still have it, given the state of some of my living arrangements (we did find a dead bird in the dishes once, literally), but anyway it could definitely use some TLC.

All it did was expose this gross black thing on the pan. I really don't know what that is but it made me want to toss this pan altogether.

- Treat your hair - The instructions read: Heat a cup of vegetable oil in the microwave for 10-15 seconds, until warm but not hot. Massage the oil well into dry hair, cover with a shower cap or wet towel and let it soak for about 20 minutes. To remove, get in the shower and shampoo it a couple times. 
So here goes nothing, for science!

Was not excited to pour oil on my head

Letting it soak

I can't tell if it worked or not because I lathered, rinsed, and repeated at least 3x so my hair condition after was likely the result of my actual shampoo as much as it was the result of the vegetable oil. Will need to conduct more trials.

Honestly, originally I was going to do a bunch of these things and see what happened but I ran out of steam. The uses for vegetable oil are not as groundbreaking as I had hoped and were instead designed to help every day chores. While helpful, these are not exciting and I lost interest in doing things like: unsticking zippers, greasing locks, removing paint from hands ... until I saw that you can make your own lamp. Uncontrolled fire in my apartment? Sign me up! (Unfortunately, I didn't have the right tools nor the means to obtain them, so sadly this experiment went untested. Yet another disappointment in the post that is chock-full of them)

Things online I didn't try:
- Measuring sticky ingredients - I didn't have any purpose to measure peanut butter and I am not about to waste some precious peanut butter by covering it in stupid vegetable oil. Didn't attempt.

- Grating cheese - To be honest, I've never had a problem with cheese clumping when I'm grating it. Perhaps this is because I don't own a cheese grater and have bought shredded cheese for every occasion I can remember. Regardless, didn't attempt.

- Removing splinters - I didn't have a preexisting splinter and I don't care about this blog enough to attempt to self-inflict one.

- Clean pearls - Didn't have any pears lying around that were fixin for a good scrubbin. And I didn't want to risk tarnishing my puka shell necklace.

Things I experimented with:
- Gallon challenge (the actual gallon challenge doesn't start until 4:55 in however i found the entire video up to that point pretty entertaining) - Not attempted. Without one of these, it seemed unsafe.

- Toothpaste - Not recommended. Can't comment on its effectiveness compared to chewing trident gum either. It probably removes plaque by the pure virtue of brushing, however I don't know what the oil does to your enamel. One problem I did encounter was that vegetable oil spit is not as viscous as toothpaste spit so it kept dribbling down the brush and onto my hand. Be forewarned.

- Relaxing foot bath - It was kinda relaxing although I can't see why you'd do it. Honestly it just caused more problems than anything - the tub was so slippery after the foot bath that it was downright dangerous.

I had another thought while doing the foot bath and hair experiment: we could get an Ebola vegetable oil challenge. Like the ALS ice bucket challenge, you would have to pour vegetable oil over your head or donate $100 to Ebola efforts in Africa.

- Greasing up your computer keyboard and everything else in your apartment: works splendidly. Now everything that I touched is covered in oil and slippery - perfect! Seriously, my bathroom smells like vegetable oil still (2 days later) and it is not ideal.

All told, I used about 1/4 of one vegetable oil container so this post didn't even serve the purpose of lightening my vegetable oil load. All told, I would advise against pretty much everything I did in this blog and if given the opportunity I would spend my Sunday afternoon differently.

Song of the blog - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qIvJS6SmDI
(tribute to my 20/20 hindsight)

Last but certainly not least, congrats to IK and CK!