There’s something so exciting about cracking open a brand new puzzle. You carefully study the puzzle image and imagine hours of relaxing time with your new favorite puzzle. However, nothing ruins the moment more than a ton of puzzle dust.
In this guide, we’re going to teach you what to do about too much puzzle dust to avoid a mess and sneezing attack. Plus, we’ll share ways to choose puzzles with little to no dust. Let’s dive in!
Puzzle dust is simply dust that sheds from cardboard or chipboard puzzle pieces. Dusting typically accumulates when a puzzle is cut, and if the manufacturer doesn’t remove it before it gets to your hands, you end up with tons of dust.
Sometimes puzzle dust gathers into the corner of the plastic puzzle bag, while other times it’s spread on the surface of the pieces. When the latter happens, the dust is hard to see, which is how you end up with dust all over the place when you unpack your puzzle.
Puzzle dust is no fun because it’s messy, can trigger dust allergies, and gives your pieces a gritty feel. It just overall creates a lackluster puzzling experience, especially if there’s a ton of it.
To avoid a puzzle dust explosion in your face, the first thing you need to do is inspect the puzzle in its bag before you cut it open. If you see a ton of puzzle dust, the most thorough way to prevent a mess is to remove your puzzle pieces from the bag one by one. However, this method is also tedious. To save time, try these puzzle dust tips:
Checking for puzzle dust beforehand is the best way to not let it ruin your puzzling experience! After all of these steps, you can still go the extra mile to eliminate puzzle dust by using puzzle sorters with tiny holes in them that sift the dust out.
At Completing the Puzzle, we rave about puzzle sorters because they make the whole puzzling experience more fun and organized. We even wrote a review of our top five favorite puzzle sorters - check it out here.
The Cobble Hill Puzzle Sorting Trays are our top choice for trays with tiny holes to sift out puzzle dust. It’s also affordable and will enhance your entire puzzle experience. Buy it here!
Some brands are better than others when it comes to puzzle dust. Some take care to clean their pieces and eliminate dust in the manufacturing process before the puzzle is packaged. The puzzle may still shed lightly, but you’ll get much less puzzle dust overall than you would with a brand that doesn’t do anything about it.
How do you know which brands are the best for limited puzzle dust? We recommend reading reviews and checking out the brand websites. The brands that take extra care to eliminate dust usually brag about it on their website or puzzle packaging. However, in case a brand is embellishing, you should still go to the reviews to find honest feedback about the quality of their puzzles.
We’ve written a number of puzzle brand reviews for the brands we include in our Completing the Puzzle rental catalog. Check out all four reviews here:
No one likes puzzle dust, and the jigsaw puzzling community is always honest with their feedback. You’ll know which puzzle brands to avoid by reading a few reviews.
At Completing the Puzzle, we’re on a mission to make puzzling more communal and eco-friendly. That’s why we started a puzzle rental program. All the puzzles in our catalog get shared and reused among our community, which creates a lot less waste than buying new puzzles.
Plus, we inspect every single puzzle in our catalog before we ship them out. We only stock premium puzzles from top-quality manufacturers that hate puzzle dust as much as we do, so you know that there will never be a dust explosion. We also thoroughly sanitize each puzzle in between rentals, which eliminates any potential puzzle dust that fell through the cracks.
A Completing the Puzzle rental membership is fun, planet-friendly, and puzzle dust-free!
At Completing the Puzzle, we’d love to have you in our thriving community of fellow puzzlers. We have an active community of friendly puzzlers who make puzzling more than just a solo hobby.
It’s easy to get started: simply select your difficulty level (easy, intermediate, or expert), and tell us about your puzzle preferences. You can even create a wishlist from our puzzle catalog so we can send you exactly what you want. Plus, you can give a membership to a friend or family member through our gift cards!
Sign up today and start compiling your puzzle wishlist so we can send off the perfect puzzle for you. Sign up for a Completing the Puzzle membership today and get 20% off your first month when you use code SPECIAL20.
