I’m heavy handed and a bit inaccurate when it comes to being careful, but I do love a shiny white bathroom suite.
In the course of my cleansing I have, over time got bleach sloshed about with some gusto (we’re talking standard, chlorine based bleach here. Think domestos or your favourite brand of “Thick bleach”)
So, eli5: why does this bleach turn my black towels pink, my blue towels orange, my orange towels green, and my green towels white?
I can’t see any correlation or predictably here… WTF does bleach do to soft fabrics?!
In: 6
A blue towel is blue because something in it (dye) is absorbing some colours of light, but reflecting the blue light. There’s a specific molecule, or combination of them, that are responsible for this, and the colour they reflect is based on things like the shape or makeup of the molecule itself.
Bleach works by oxidising things, which is a chemical reaction similar to what happens when you burn something. When bleach oxidises your dye molecule, it changes the structure, and the new molecule you end up with will absorb and reflect light differently, changing the colour you see. *Usually* it just turns things white, but possibly you’re getting new visible colours, or maybe removing some dyes is causing other ones to become visible instead.
The actual details of what dye molecules exist and how they change are weird and I don’t know them myself, but there are a LOT of possibilities, which is why you can’t necessarily see a distinct pattern in the way different colours are changed.
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