How To: Pull the Decapitated Shrunken Head in a Jar Prank

A good prank requires decent effort, creativity, and impeccable timing.

If you're in the office, there are plenty of hilarious pranks to play on coworkers, and for your family and friends, there's everything from toothpaste-filled Oreos, to solid milk, to impossible-to-solve Rubik's Cubes and smartphone-friendly pranks.

If you want to get all grim on your April Fool's Day targets, you could pull the classic bloody shower head prank or bleeding gums trick, or go even further with this jarred head in the fridge prank.

We've all seen those gross shrunken heads in films and on TV before, so now it's time to bring it on home to your refrigerator, thanks to Instructables user mikeasaurus, who is also responsible for the ear-splitting office chair prank.

How to Make Your Decapitated Head in a Jar

For this prank, you will need a sexy and large picture of your face (or someone else's), laminated paper, a jar, and food coloring. You can also use pickle juice, which naturally has a "heads-could-go-here" color. The most difficult part is getting a quality picture and making it actually look like your head is really inside that jar.

Mikeasaurus created a Photoshop (PSD) file of his head that you can use as a template to create your own version, but if you're not very proficient at Photoshop (or don't even have Photoshop), you could just use his head with this PDF file.

If your victim is a Justin Bieber fanatic, I'd recommend printing out this Bieber head-in-a-jar pic from Lebowski (he used Pixlr for his photo editing).

Once you have your image, grab your jar (the bigger the jar the better) and fill it up with colored water (greenish) and drop your laminated image inside. Make sure the image is laminated so that the water won't completely ruin it.

Then just place the jar inside the fridge and wait for your victims to discover your mad genius. Putting a spy camera nearby to catch their reactions is always a handy addition to any prank.

Check out the complete tutorial by mikeasaurus for more photos and detailed steps on creating a custom head-in-a-jar picture from scratch using Photoshop.