Edit: I was putting on a shrunken sweater and I thought maybe the fabrics were bunched together, so I started tugging at various parts of the sweater to try and loosen the strings. Then it occurred to me that it would never retain its previous shape. Is it just (optically, for lack of a better explanation) smaller because of the tighter fabrics, or did some of the (mass) escape and is somewhere else (ie in the air) or what?
In: Chemistry
Clothes don’t lose mass when they shrink*, the fibres and threads just get squished closer together, so the density increases.
*A miniscule amount of mass is “lost” as fibres shed off during the process and are washed away with the water. This is where a lot of water microplastic comes from.
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