“The typical jack-o’-lantern normally has a three-day life expectancy at best,” said Marc Evan, co-founder of Maniac Pumpkin Carvers in Brooklyn, New York, in a phone interview. “With something so highly perishable, it’s a very zen thing, to carve a pumpkin knowing that it might not last as long as it took you to make it.”
However, if you’re determined to make your jack-o’-lantern endure for as long as humanly possible, Evan and his Maniac Pumpkin Carvers co-founder, Chris Soria, say you can take several preventative steps to decelerate its demise. I also spoke to Wirecutter contributor Taryn Mohrman, who wrote our step-by-step guide on how to carve a jack-o’-lantern, for further advice. Just keep in mind that, as Evan pointed out, “Even with everything that you do to try and preserve them, sometimes they still rot in three days. But you can always carve more pumpkins.”
We do not recommend brining pumpkins, spraying them with bleach or, um, coating them in WD-40, as some questionable advisors on the internet might suggest. Any of these options can be harmful to wildlife—not to mention that they are a lot of work for what might still be little or no payoff.
