Cut 'em open and pour them in a jar with a tight seal. When you need a pack, microwave hell out of some and rubber band them into a piece of coffee filter.
The colored beads indicate how water saturated they are. When they're nuked and dried out, they change color. YMMV as some manufacturers use different colors or none at all. Whatever. Nuke 'em and reuse.
It's an exciting hobby.
In some languages (e.g. Hebrew, my native language) the words are homonyms. Spelled the same, pronounced the same. So speakers of those languages might not even be aware that they're different materials. I'll go as far as to say most of those speakers don't know.
So for English-as-a-second-language speakers, miscommunications like this are pretty likely.
You did well to explain the difference without being mean about it :)