For all of our lives we been told wrong about what the blue end of an eraser is for

I was today years old when I actually learned what the blue end of an eraser is there for. At school, teachers told us that the longer, softer end of an eraser is for pencil, and the shorter, more rough end could erase pen or ink. More times than not, we’d end up with destroyed paper, and still a lot of ink marks, because the blue end never seemed to do its function.

Want to know why? Because that was never its intention. My mind has been blown.

You might be wondering how I got here. It’s a fair question. This was brought to my attention when a tweet went viral recently. It said: “Some people still think this part is for erasing the pencil, is that right?” An attached image showed the classic two-tone erasers we’re all used to using, with an arrow pointing at the smaller end.

I quickly realised I might have been missing something, so I looked it up. It turns out there are entire YouTube tutorials about the real purpose of the blue end of an eraser. Yes, really.

Bazıları hâlâ bu kısmın kalemi silmek için olduğunu düşünüyor doğru mu? pic.twitter.com/UVqxUjSJKD

— Mehmet Harmancı (@hrmncymhmt) April 22, 2026

So, what is the blue end of an eraser actually used for?

Most Read

Four key and huge details about Mackenzie Shirilla that The Crash on Netflix missed out

Audio reveals sick prison phone call between Mackenzie Shirilla and her mum after her crime

Wait, did Fox News actually just interview a man in a mask? The bizarre theory explained

The YouTube video that holds all the answers began with a lovely history of the eraser. Apparently, people used to use breadcrumbs to erase mistakes, and one day a man reached for his breadcrumbs and accidentally picked up a piece of rubber. The rest is history! Apparently, anyway.

Moving on, the man narrating the video said he too had been told as a kid that the smaller end of an eraser is for ink, but you actually end up just ruining the paper. So he explained what the actual answer is.

“The harder end of our erasers (the blue end) is meant to be used to erase pencil marks from heavy grades of papers, such as grainy art kind,” the video said. It actually flipped the text to be all capital letters at this point too, to prove it’s a big deal.

“On these papers, pencil marks are harder to be removed with regular erasers, so the blue end of the eraser was purposefully designed harder to allow pencil marks to be removed easily from harder grades of paper. Therefore, the blue part was never meant for removing ink / pen marks from paper. It was all just one big, very common, misunderstanding.”

My whole life is a lie!

For more like this – like The Tab on Facebook.