Beauty Treatments

Beauty Treatments

Martyn White | Thursday, 17 October 2024

I'm a bit short of things to write about this week. It got hot again after the typhoon, temperatures were easily in the range where a top water bass bite would have been on the cards but I had made other arrangements.

One thing I did do was start applying floatant to my hairbugs for next year. I like to get as much stuff on them as the bugs can take.  This means multiple applications, heat, drying time and a lot of floatant. I still carry a tub of mucilin and a bottle of gink while I'm bass fishing, but rarely need to use them on the pretreated bugs.
 
During this week I took advantage of the heat and treated the bugs then sat the box on the windowsill to let the sun do the work of melting the grease so it could be absorbed by the hair and then dry the bugs. I'll repeat this every week or so over the winter, but as the weather cools I'll sit them in front of the heater rather than the window. Eventually the bugs will stop taking any more, and the floatant will give them a sort of filmy feeling. Obviously doing this with 20 or 30 bugs is pretty floatant intensive, especially when they're in the 4 - 2/0 size range. They can carry much more than a size 16 compara dun for example. 
So rather than buying loads of little bottles of floatant I looked for an alternative, I briefly considered making some paraffin and naptha liquid floatant using Bergmann's recipe. Cheap, quick and floaty, but it's a process. In the end, I discovered Albolene, a makeup remover that's been around since the 1940s. It's gink: Mineral oil, petroleum jelly, paraffin. It requires no mixing or dissolving on my part and comes by the pound. It's cheaper than 45 bottles of gink and does away with all the single use plastic bottles. I can't see any downside to the switch.  I'm going to try it on an old line to see how it works on them, but I'll prpbably stick with a clean & wipe of mucilin on that front.
 
So if you have a need for large amounts of floatant, give it a try and see.