Moon Sand
The moldable indoor "sand" that played like dough and, famously, never dried out. You could pack it into molds and crumble it back apart again and again—no water needed—which is exactly why it ended up ground into so many living-room carpets.
Moon Sand was a Swedish-invented compound brought to the North American mass market by Spin Master in 2006. Its trick was in the grains: each one was coated in a hydrophobic compound so the sand bonded to itself, letting you mold and sculpt it indoors with no water—and, per the marketing, letting it be "used over and over again" because it never dried out. Priced around twenty dollars and aimed at kids roughly four and up, it became a runaway 2006 holiday hit, with retailers reporting shortages.
The same quality that made it fun made it a parental menace: a substance engineered never to harden and to cling to itself was also very good at working its way into carpet fibers and staying there. By the early 2010s the arrival of Kinetic Sand—a distinctly different formulation, also sold by Spin Master—had largely superseded it, and Moon Sand faded from shelves. But for a stretch of the mid-2000s it was the definitive rainy-day toy: endlessly moldable, never-drying, and impossible to fully vacuum up.
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