When visiting my favorite computer support website, I didn’t expect to find information on a common household product like Bounce brand dryer sheets. However, as with many successful Internet communities, the feature sometimes exceeds its original ambitions. There was a September 12th post that caught my eye, “Bounce This” filed in “The Doctor’s Lounge” (usually reserved for birthday announcements or other off-topic comments). I was surprised to find that the post was written as a copy of an advertisement for Bounce brand dryer sheets:
The US Postal Service messaged all postmen to put a Bounce sheet in their uniform pockets to store their yellow jackets. [sic] far.
Wear them all the time when playing baseball and soccer. It really works. Yellow jackets just revolve around you.
1. All this time you’ve been putting Bounce in the dryer! It will scare away ants when you place a sheet near them. It also repels mice.
2. Spread sheets around foundation areas, or in sitting trailers or cars, and prevent mice from entering your vehicle.
3. Eliminate the smell of books and photo albums that are not opened too often.
4. Repels mosquitoes. Tie a bounce sheet through a belt when outdoors during mosquito season.
The publication went on to claim a total of 21 “alternative” uses for the product. I was amazed. Money can’t buy advertising like this! My first thought was “What’s in these dryer sheets anyway?” Surely if they repelled insects they must be toxic. So I turned to the number one resource related to the hazards of any household consumable, the Material Safety Data Sheet. Hoping to find something carcinogenic (or at least not environmentally friendly); I was disappointed when the most serious health warning read: “Ingestion of used or unused bedding by a small child or household pet can cause an impact on the gastrointestinal tract. A doctor or veterinarian should be contacted.” So they could cause constipation, but obviously the manufacturers weren’t worried about what might happen if you actually digested it.
“Biodegradable fabric softening agents”, whatever they are, are the active chemicals in sheets. According to the MSDS sheet, if you give the rats enough (more than 1% of their body weight), it will kill them. That sounded like damning evidence to me, until I realized that if I ate 1% of my body weight of just about anything, I’d probably be pretty sick myself.
By now I thought the 21 statements were a bit more dubious. Surely there must be official claims on BounceEverywhere.com, the website for this product. While Procter and Gamble, the owner of the Bounce brand, does not claim to have extraordinary knack for fighting insects, some of the posters on Bounce’s message boards do. “When in an outdoor area where wasps are a problem, just rub a new bounce sheet on your hair, clothing, and exposed skin. It seems to repel[sic] pests and it keeps you smelling fresh, “states Margie M. from Salyersville, KY. Well, obviously Bounce isn’t trying to deny that it can repel insects, even if they don’t promote it directly for that reason. As I said I did some more research in posts and found a trend. Supposedly they repel mosquitoes, wasps, wasps, hornets, wasps, moths, ticks, chiggers, ants, rats, mice, chipmunks, and even birds. That’s right, someone posting on BounceEverywhere.com claims to have used bounce to remove wallpaper. Bounce’s official position on posts is “We do not edit your comments and therefore we are not responsible for their content or accuracy.” Having read enough of these outlandish claims, my research took a cynical turn. Surely there must be an impartial resource to analyze these claims. So I checked my favorite authority for confirming and debunking modern myths, snopes.com.
Snopes’s article, titled “Bounce Back,” addressed sixteen claims made about Bounce in a high-circulation email first documented in 2003. The article gave two of the sixteen claims a clear victory for Bounce (both related to its odor-fighting properties) and four states definitely not, while the balance fell into a category where it was not particularly effective, ineffective, or measurable.
At this point he was lost. How could he refute all the claims he had come across so far? I returned my research to the original post that started my dilemma. I saw that my comments had elicited a few more responses. “It is also an elephant repellent. Do you see any elephants?” Posted SpywareDr. My research had only managed to ask more questions than it answered, when another poster claimed:
* Put one on your car’s fuel tank filler neck and increase gas mileage by 430%.
* Stick ten sheets on the two bumpers of your car to avoid accidents; repels other vehicles.
* Put a sheet in your dishwasher and your dishes will be wrinkle free.
* A sheet or two at the bottom of your computer case will prevent BSOD [windows errors] and corrupt files.
I haven’t seen a difference in gas mileage yet, but I haven’t had an accident since 1985, none of my chainrings are wrinkled, and my computer works perfectly.
The Internet is the most ubiquitous tool of the information age, but it seems to thrive on misinformation and misinformation. Realizing that after all this research on the Internet I still did not have one of these mystical leaves in my hand, I went to the supermarket to buy a box for my own experiments. Glancing down the aisles, I made my way to the spot on the shelf where the original Bounce scented dryer sheets should have been. “Fresh Outdoor Scent,” “Fresh Linen,” and “Spring Awakening,” the boxes proclaimed. I resigned myself to smelling like a “summer garden” and stuffed one in my jacket pocket. Two days later, I visited a friend with a small parakeet as a pet. As the bird hopped off the couch and sat on my lap, I remembered that the dryer sheet was still in my jacket, inches from this adorable bird.
While my research revealed that Bounce may not be a bird repellent, I have not seen mosquitoes, wasps, wasps, wasps, moths, ticks, chiggers, ants, rats, mice, or chipmunks. Or elephants, for that matter. But the box containing the rest of my Bounce dryer sheets will stay right where it belongs: in my laundry room, on the shelf above my dryer.
