The Silly Putty brand is owned by Crayola LLC (formerly the Binney & Smith company). Silly Putty is sold as a 13 g (0.46 oz) piece of clay inside an egg-shaped plastic container. After a long period of time, it will return to its original viscosity. It also becomes harder to remove small amounts of it from surfaces. If Silly Putty is submerged in warm or hot water, it will become softer and thus "melt" much faster. Silly Putty will dissolve when in contact with an alcohol after the alcohol evaporates, the material will not exhibit its original properties. Hand sanitizers containing alcohol are often helpful. Generally, Silly Putty is difficult to remove from textured items such as dirt and clothing. Newer papers with soy-based inks are more resistant to this process. When newspaper ink was petroleum based, Silly Putty could be used to transfer newspaper images to other surfaces, providing amusement by distorting the transferred image afterwards. Silly Putty is also a fairly good adhesive. Because its apparent viscosity increases directly with respect to the amount of force applied, Silly Putty can be characterized as a dilatant fluid. Viscoelasticity is a type of non-Newtonian flow, characterizing material that acts as a viscous liquid over a long time period but as an elastic solid over a short time period.
Silly Putty's unusual flow characteristics are due to the ingredient polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a viscoelastic substance.