After 20 years of leaving the Olympics empty-handed, the U.S. women’s synchronized swimming team finally made it to the podium in the three-day competition on August 7, winning the silver medal.
This year, the women’s team confidently performed a complicated routine to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” in the arena at the Paris 2024 Games. They finished just behind China and outperformed Spain, showing their strength under the guidance of coach Andrea Fuentes, a four-time Olympic synchronized swimmer.
While the U.S. team’s triumph marks a turning point in Olympic history for the hard-working athletes, viewers turned their attention to one key style detail: their hair. Female Olympic athletes recently took to TikTok to show how they undo their hairstyles after competition.
Viewers could watch athletes on the app peel off what appeared to be a solid layer of clear gelatin stuck over their entire head, raising questions about the style.
On August 7 Yahoo Sports posted on his social media account to answer the questions everyone is asking. “What do synchronized swimmers put in their hair and how do they get it out?” read the caption on the screen.
Daniella Ramirez of the US team said: “We put Knox gelatin on it, and Knox gelatin is basically what you use for Jell-O. It’s powder and you put it in hot water.”
Back in February, Ramirez described her hair routine for the competition on her personal TikTok page and explained why synchronized swimmers apply gelatin to their hair.
“It’s designed to keep the hair in place while swimming and is purely for aesthetic reasons,” she said.
According to Ramirez’s teammate Megumi Field, the preparation can be extensive depending on the athlete’s experience. “The hairstyle takes about 2.5 hours at first, but as the years go by, it eventually takes only 40 minutes,” she said.
“The Knox is not as hard as it looks. It’s basically just hot water,” Ramirez noted. “You don’t have to use shampoo if you don’t want to. Just standing under boiling hot water will dissolve it and scald your head.”
Field says it’s best to start by peeling and peeling off the gelatin before running the head under hot water because it can sometimes be difficult to break up.
The “most painful part” of removing the gelatin, Ramirez said, is the ponytail section. “The bobby pins that you put in, sometimes you put one in and then it’s 60 or 70 bobby pins at once,” she said.
“When you have one and you don’t know where it is and it’s bothering you all day, you’re trying to figure out what pain hurts and then you have a headache,” she continued. “And you think to yourself, ‘Please make it stop.'”
Some TikTok users admitted that they have tried putting Knox gelatin in their hair and that removing it is not as easy as the athletes made it out to be.
“I used to perk up my hair with Knox gelatin. It’s hard to remove, that’s for sure. My hair was perked up for a week,” commented one experienced person.
One shocked viewer confessed: “I have an extremely sensitive scalp. I could never have done that.”
“My fine hair is screaming at this. I can’t believe they do this to my hair,” another woman agreed.
