I was given a box of loose tea for Christmas. It is a very nice box, and it was very nice tea. I would like to keep the box to use for keeping coffee beans in. The box has paper labels stuck to it, presumably using some kind of glue, so I thought these would come straight off if given a bit of a soak. No way. When wet the paper came straight off, but the sticky glue remained. I soaked the box again and again but clearly the stuff was not going to come off. The picture on the right shows the top of the box with the nasty sticky residue.
Internet searches suggested soaking (not much help), nail varnish remover, lighter fluid, eucaliptus oil, and WD40. The only one of these I had was WD40 but that was in the car and it was very cold outside, so I decided to try some vegetable oil in the kitchen. Amazingly the vegetable oil worked to remove the sticky label. I had to be quite generous with it, and let the label soack in the vegetable oil for a while, but the sticky glue went lumpy and rubbed right off (lower picture on the right).