Science Experiments

Something is bleaching my towels. Not my husband's towel. Nor my towels downstairs or at the bedroom sink. But every towel I touch in the bathroom becomes bleached. It's becoming pretty annoying as I happen to really like my towels, and prefer they not become stained with unsightly yellow blotches. I'm hoping to figure out what's been going wrong so I can fix the problem.

This is clearly a case for SCIENCE!

Since my husband's towel isn't affected, I can pretty assuredly say that this is the result of something only I'm using, which rules out a few things. I also suspect, based on the bleaching "pattern" that this is either my conditioner or my body wash. But, to be thorough, I'm testing just about everything I use on a daily/weekly basis.

Here are the possible culprits. One of them is, without a doubt, the guilty party.

My experiment is being done on the very towel that fell victim to this accursed crime. Since it's already bleached, I figure a little more can't hurt. Plus, I'd already replaced it for being a pretty ineffective towel ($5 target purchases sometimes aren't the best plan), but don't tell it that. I wouldn't want to hurt it's feelings.

Instead, I think that covering it with sharpy and bits of goop is just what the at-home scientist ordered. I found the least bleached section of the towel, made a box for each product, as well as one for water and one as a "control" which got nothing added to it at all (my 5th grade science fair training is clearly coming back to me) (or, you know, that BA in biology) (maybe).

I then dabbed each product at the top of it's square, and added a label at the bottom...

...until each product had it's own space.

And there we have it. Clockwise from top left we have water, body wash, hair gel, conditioner, control, shampoo, skin cream, facial wash, and benzol peroxide. I put the towel in a dry, draft-free area to sit for a day or two, at which point I'll wash off the products and see if any of them bleached the part of the towel it was sitting on. My money's on the conditioner, but we'll see.

In the meantime, I'll have to think of something terrible to do to the product that's to blame. It can't just get a slap on the wrist for something like this. I'm open to creative suggestions from my readers, so if you have any ideas let me know in the comments!

Hoping to be bleachlessly yours,

Caity