exposure | a history of bleach

For years I’ve been a huge fan of bleach. And I mean bleach for everything – I’ll bleach the bathroom clean, the kitchen countertops, the floors, even if they’re wood, my hair, the bathtub, laundry; you name it, I bleach it.

I have used so much bleach that I have actually acquired a weird thing called “chemical pneumonia” which my doctor was astonished to discover in anyone, since this is usually the kind of thing that one only reads about on the back of the Clorox bottle, but Lo! If anyone was going to get it, it would be me, because I am bleach addicted. Oh, say what you want about having bleached my brains out. I can tell you I have the cleanest house around, and now that I’ve gone on a painting spree, I have the smell of fresh paint, all latex and lovely and the house looks like the freakin’ Ritz with its shining wood surfaces and lovely white kitchen countertops and bathroom. No complaints here.

I have also patrolled the aisles of the drugstore, because I am depressed and when I am depressed the drugstore always cheers me up because you can buy shit there that will make your life better, or seemingly better, or make you think it is because it is cleaner and neater and not such a buzzing ball of chaos. So far, I have bought a Clorox toilet cleaner thingy with a special handle so you don’t even have to touch the gross end part, you just click and Whoosh! off it comes and click again to add another sponge.

I’ve bought Crest White Strips (which really do work) and Pearl Drops Whitening (which also work) as well as Crest Whitening Toothpaste Vivid White, which with the Pearl Drops works better. I’ve also bought a jar of Nads hair remover so I can have my white skin hair free, though it’s already pretty hair free because I’m light-complected and blonde (well, grey, but blondish grey now: note that grey is also white, like it ahs been bleached.)

I have in my basket those items, plus a Strawberry Lip Smacker from Bonne Bell, a fade cream from Dr. Palmers to fade away my freckles because I hate that I look Celtic because where I’m from, that makes me Scottish (I am) and a second-class citizen to those higher ups in London, la de da, etc. Not all look upon us this way, but enough, and the only film to capture it well was Trainspotting. Watch it and understand why people in Scotland turn to drugs; what the hell else is there to do. We’re the poor cousin of Britain, yet part of it, no independence, we’ve shed far too much blood, we’re all red haired or blonde and freckled, like we inbred and never mixed up our gene pool, so in a way, we’re all even looking and plain, or at least I am.

Maybe the Bonne Bell Lip Smacker will remedy this though doubtful. Or maybe the White Strips. If not, that’s fine. I have too bottles of Clorox bleach (why ,I don’t’ know get), paint rollers, sponges, whitening agents for all manner of things, and even a groovy whitening pen that I simply love and blank CDs to burn the Best of Bob Dylan onto discs so I can listen to it while I drive around in my little Mini looking like an overexposed photograph with my too-white teeth, grey-blonde hair, and naturally superwhite skin. I look like someone forgot to the turn the flash off and took a picture.

Two hours later I have the cleanest, most up to date, bleached clean of mold and bacteria house on the block and more, given what I have done to my own body , between ridiculous depilatories (why why why?) and bleach, I match my house. We are both damn clean and dizzy as hell from the fumes, which may be why I have determined today to find out a brief history of bleach.

Am I the only person who uses bleach and who doesn’t know from whence it came? I have no idea, or had no idea, where I cam from. I began to investigate. After all, we (okay, maybe I’m the only one who excessively uses bleach) use it for so many things that there must be some good in it, a greater good beyond my hair (which was blonde to start with and grey, so now is sun lightened – “bleached by the sun” they say – are the two connected?).

I’m on a mission to find out, and here is what I found out from various sources, including a very good article in the Washington Post
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5000 B.C.
To begin, I’m right about the sun. In 5000 BC Egyptians used the sun to whiten their linens and were the first recorded in history to know the whitening power of the sun or to even bother lightening their clothes. Why we or they lighten our clothes is another issue – maybe they, like us, associate white with clean or pure, or maybe it’s just a color preference. In any event, it’s a curious thing that we like to bleach the hell of things and make them whiter. Curious indeed.

3000 B.C.
By 3,000 BC, bleach is discovered and found that one can derive a whitening solution from wood ashes which, when mixed with water, develop a lye solution that will lighten things. People discover that when the solution is mixed in the right amounts, it has the ability to whiten things and when you soak something in lye, it turns even whiter. They learn that if you leave anything in there too long, it will disintegrate (we all have learned this hard lesson when our favorite tank top returned tissue thin and with gentle holes….how sad.). This lye process is still a bit clunky and the whitening process takes several hours. More, it’s pretty strong stuff, so handle with care.

1000-1200 A.D.
The Dutch become the laundry experts for European society (quell surprise). Without disclosing their secret, they added sour milk to the lye solution, softening its harsh effects. That meant the soaking and sun-drying could be repeated more times than when lye was used alone. But the process took up to eight weeks and required space to spread fabrics out to dry in the sun. Those Dutch like their things clean and sparkling white, which doesn’t really surprise me. They seem like a pretty together, and on top of it people. Then I remember that one of the powder bleaches that I used to use had a picture of a little Dutch boy on it. Another brand had a chicken on it, which I don’t understand at all, what does that have to do with bleach or whitening? Is it representative of that awful Chicken Yellow color that some people get when they bleach their dark brown hair blonde and it comes up funky looking because they took the bleach out too soon?

1200 A.D.
The dictionary uses the word Bleach for the first time and it is official. Bleach has been developed, even though the use of it and discovery predates the first official word by thousands of years.

1598
Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor" notes: "Behold, what honest cloathes [sic] you send forth to bleaching." A couple of hundred years later, a Scottish scientist discovered that a solution of sulfuric acid used instead of sour milk, cut bleaching time to a mere twelve hours. Good thing they improved the process, otherwise my house and my teeth would certainly not be as white as they are, and more, there wouldn’t be as many blondes in the world. Has anyone else noticed that there are more blondes in America than in Europe, overall? I was recently in France and noticed that by and large, the women were darker complected (history explains this well, with the Arab mix and Indochina history), and more, the women had normal size breasts. I guess bleaching and absurdly round breast implants are not all the rage in Paris. Tant mieux.

1792
In France, Claude Louis Berthollet, Napoleon's scientific expert, noted that chlorine gas added to a solution of potash created a powerful bleach. The idea made the rounds of Europe, but putting the exact amount of each component into the mix was difficult. And potash was pricey.

1799
Scottish (hooray! at last, my people get recognition.) chemist Charles Tennant took Berthollet's chlorine idea, substituted limestone for the potash, and made a bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite). In decades, bleaching powder spread over Europe, whitening not only clothes but also other products, especially writing paper. But because the powder contained so much chlorine, it still was expensive.

1897
A century after Tennant's discovery, Sears Roebuck & Co. listed five bleaching products in its catalogue: ammonia, borax, lye, and bluing and dry bluing -- the latter two referring to a liquid and a powder solution of plant additives, mostly indigo, designed to make clothes whiter or slightly blue.

1913
The Electro-Alkaline Co. was formed in Oakland, Calif., to make sodium hypochlorite bleach, derived from chlorinating a solution of caustic soda, a process developed a century earlier. The active ingredient of most household bleach today, this was costly to make until the early 20th century, when cheaper electricity permitted electrolyzing salt brine from salt ponds. Touted as a disinfectant, bleach was sold in big crocks only to institutional users such as commercial laundries and water companies. This was the first iteration of the company that would become what we know today as Clorox Company.

After a time, the Electro-Alkaline Company company changed its name to Clorox Chemical Company, today, just known as Clorox, and began giving away bottles to customers and store owners by the pint.

On June 7th, 1924 a magazine called Literary Digest wrote an article telling about the virtues of bleach and its household uses for sanitation. Americans began using household bleach and by 1947, it was listed in the Good Housekeeping book as a best product.

Today, bleach is used for a wide variety of uses, of course, laundry being the biggest market, but more importantly, bleach is used to help sanitize water supplies in developing nations, providing millions of people with sanitized and cleansed water for drinking and cooking.

Here are a few of the most common uses of bleach today, though by no means is this a complete listing. The most notable use of bleach, before you begin, is clearly its use as a converter for water to make it safe and drinkable for developing nations that desperately need sustenance. Off the top of my head:

Humidifier sanitizer: a few drops of bleach per gallon to the humidifier water.
Freshener: wipe down any closed boxes etc with a dilute solution of bleach and water to remove any lasting odors.
Mold: wipe down shower curtains and bath tubs with bleach on a sponge. This will kill any mildew that is growing and prevent new mildew from growing. This helps prevent disease and allergies from bleach.
Flowers and vase mold: add a few small drops of bleach to flowers in a vase to prevent slime mold from growing in the flowers and in the water on the vase. The flowers will not be harmed by only a few drops and will last a little bit longer as well.
Fungicide: Bleach can be used as a fungicide, a deodorizer, a whitening agent, a bacteria and mold and spore killer, to make water safe for drinking, to prevent slime mold growth, as chlorine in swimming pools to make them safer and cleaner for swimming and much more.

Bleach is also the name of a band – not sure if this has been used before, but there is a group today. Bleach is also the name of an album by Nirvana (our boy Cobain was also preoccupied with his own form of bleach, as we all know from photographs and his shaggy, white hair that worked for him).

Bleach in a different, powder formulation, is what is used to bleach hair and other items, but usually hair. You can buy Super Blue, which will lighten your hair in about five minutes (get this at a beauty supply store, but use with extreme caution or all of your hair is liable to fall out. Highlights and any shade blonder or lightening will have bleach or bleach derived ingredients that create the lightening effect that so many pay hundreds of dollars for at top hair salons. It is a refined formula, but ultimately, still bleach none theless. That said; do NOT try bleaching your hair with Clorox, as the fumes alone will harm you. You must by bleach that has been toned down for hair color use.

Best of all, though, is to know that a simple thing like bleach can be put to such productive use and literally save lives, not only in America, but in other nations, particularly developing nations. Bleach has literally helped wipe out various and sundry diseases caused by bacteria and viruses – without bleach, we may still have various waterborne illnesses and plagues.

For all of the accounts about overuse of antibacterial cleansers, mostly that is true, yet for some reason, this does not seem to apply to bleach. It is true that with some cleansers, you wipe the counter and overkill the bacteria and literally double the number will grow in place of the area you have wiped clean. More, there are those who say that the use of antibacterial agents make us more susceptible to certain bacteria and viruses because we do not have enough of them in our environment to build up any immunity. This much may be true, but again, it seems not to apply to bleach.

That said, one must be careful not to over use bleach, s yours truly has done and get chemical pneumonia (a painful wheezing of the lungs and the constant taste of bleach in the mouth, brought up by deposits in the lung – this comes from over use and is a kind of toxic pneumonia or chemical poisoning. Other risks that you should be aware of include fainting and for some people, particularly those with epilepsy, convulsive seizures are a risk. Always use bleach in a very well ventilated area and in a dilute solution. Never pour bleach directly onto anything, except for INTO water. Pour bleach into the sink and you risk another disaster.

Being Calamity Jane, I also fell prey to, the back splash of bleach getting in the eyes. This is an immediate 911 call and a quick trip to the nearest hospital where they put me under a running sink type thingy with a spout of water pouring directly into each eye (my eyes were taped open for this process, because one naturally wants to close them – very Clockwork Orange, sans porn). The process took over an hour, so I highly recommend using a funnel or some other device. You do not want bleach to back splash to your face.

There is your short history of bleach. In my dizzy state of consciousness from latex and bleach fumes I have researched the history of this powerful and literally, life saving product i have learned a great deal. Never underestimate the power of such a simple things. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.

by sadi ranson-polizzotti

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