Ball me, Blazer!
I used to love dryer sheets. I was alllll about them in the laundry, smelly shoes, storage totes for off-season clothes, and to reduce static cling in what I was wearing or even on my hair. I probably smelled like Snuggle or Bounce for most of my life. (And that Snuggle bear always frolicking in slow motion in a pile of fluffy towels? Seriously cute. Well done, marketing team!)
Once I started over-hauling my life in an effort to be more natural, it was time for a moment of reckoning with my beloved dryer sheets. They had to go.
Why, you may ask? What could be so nefarious with that sweet, innocent Snuggle bear?
Besides scenting your laundry, dryer sheets are meant to soften clothes and reduce static. If you take a dryer sheet and rub it between your fingers, you’ll feel a little tackiness/residue. That’s a surfactant embedded in the sheet that holds a positive charge, and some sort of fatty substance like an ammonium salt or silicone oil that when heated, allows the surfactant to spread over your clothes. The positive charge combats electrons that are knocked free during the tumbling of the dryer and lead to static.
Part of the trouble with dryer sheets is that the surfactant and fatty oil leave a residue on your clothes, your dryer drum, and your lint screen. It can make your clothes feel gnarly, build up on your drum, and clog your lint screen so it’s not able to do its job properly, which can increase the risk of lint fires. If you’re using dryer sheets, I recommend not only cleaning your lint screen as you normally would by manually removing the lint, but also scrubbing the metal mesh with a little soap and water now and then. You’d be surprised the difference that can make.
Gnarly build up aside, do you know what else is in those sheets? Fragrance.
Ah, yes. Our old friend, fragrance. Thanks to US FDA regulations protecting “trade secrets” for companies (feel free to read about it in FDA Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Part 701.3(a); it’s a real page-turner), they don’t have to list the individual ingredients that comprise their scent blends, and can just call the whole mystery chemical cocktail “fragrance.” This is bad news if you care about what you’re putting on your body and breathing in, because the US doesn’t have a stellar track record for controlling potentially toxic substances for consumers as compared with the EU.
So the Snuggle bear and his questionable wares were out. What is in?
Enter wool dryer balls.
There are oodles of instructional videos and guides on how to make these yourself if you’re interested (I was not, I draw the line at DIY ball fabrication) as well as non-wool options if that’s an issue with allergies etc. I just bought mine on Amazon and called it a day.
Dryer balls are meant to help speed up drying time and fluff your clothes without the nasty ingredients of dryer sheets, and they’re just darn cute. I anthropomorphize everything, so of course they became my little flock of “sheep balls” complete with names and personalities. Thaddeus is the troublemaker who often goes missing, off on an adventure in the sleeve of some hoodie - that little dickens.
…I digress.
Now, although the balls are fabulous at fluffing and expediting drying, they don’t excel at static reduction. I’ve tried all the tips and tricks with attaching safety pins to the sheep balls, crumpling up balls of aluminum foil to add to my laundry in the dryer, vinegar rinses in the washer, chanting “Static be gone!” 5 times facing due north by the light of the full moon on the summer solstice, and I don’t think they worked well. Really the solution is simple - just don’t dry your clothes as long. Adjust your dryer settings to a lower heat or level of dryness, (or if your dryer isn’t that high-tech, just don’t set the time for as long), and done - problem solved. And if you forget and over-dry the pile of towels that is now zapping you with actual lightening bolts when you try to wrangle them? Dampen a rag or small hand towel and put them back in for a few minutes. No biggie.
So, what about the scent? I feel like as modern people, we associate “clean” with having a scent of flowers or fruit or whatever the heck Blue Sparkle is.
Adding EOs to our sheep balls seems like the obvious choice, and I have done it, but rarely do any longer. Here’s the deal.
I’ve seen a few sources cautioning folks against using EOs on dryer balls, reason being EOs are flammable. The degree of flammability varies by oil and their chemical composition, but you could say all EOs are flammable, some more than others. You may have experienced this when ordering oils from companies, as some require a “dangerous goods” label that can change how they are able to be shipped for safety reasons. And check your oil bottles! Some say right on there - YL’s cypress and frankincense do as I recall, and I’m sure many more but I’m too lazy to get up and peel back all my labels to check.
A flash point for an EO is the temperature at which it gives off enough vapor to ignite in the air if exposed to a flame, spark, or other ignition source. This temperature varies by oil as we noted, and it’s difficult to find an exact consensus among sources for what these temperature ranges are. (And to be honest, I’m not willing to pay the ISO for their PDF on it as it’s not really relevant to my oil usage.)
I like the SDS (safety data sheets) provided by Now brand on their oils, and they list the flash points as a helpful reference. If you’re curious you can check those out here. Some do have rather low flash points, in the low 100s, and most dryers can reach temps between 125-135 F. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility, but of course you’d need a spark. This could come from a malfunctioning dryer, or a zipper sparking against the metal drum, etc.
Auto-ignition is another matter. This is when a substance can ignite without a spark, and would require far higher temperatures than we’re likely to encounter in a dryer unless something really odd is at play. Perhaps the heat generated by uncontrolled bacteria growth as is responsible for some spontaneous combustion of damp hay bales. (…if you have damp hay stored in your dryer, you have bigger problems than dryer sheets!)
The only incidents I can find regarding actual reports of these fires are in the news report here from the UK. It seems like larger volumes of EOs were at play there, and they do mention some helpful information about the importance of washing any materials with EOs on them in hot water to be sure your laundry soap is effectively removing any oil residue before they end up in the dryer.
So is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? I tend to think no, but only you can assess how you feel about that risk.
To minimize the risk, a few things you can do:
: wipe down your dryer drum periodically to avoid any EO residue build up
: only add your oily balls at the end on a low heat or no heat fluff setting
: select oils that have higher flash points than you’re likely to encounter in a dryer
Now, I mentioned I rarely use EOs on my sheep balls anymore, but after all this discussion about flammability… that’s not why! The fire risk wasn’t keeping me up at night, but I stopped for a couple of reasons:
: I’m lazy and often would anoint my balls right in the dryer (…the sentences you’d never thought you’d write before going all natural!) and sometimes I’d miss and a drop would land directly on the dryer drum. The EO ate away at the painted lining of my dryer drum, as they do, being excellent organic solvents. I could just be more careful, but there you have it.
: Rarely I’d get oil spots on my clothes. If I remembered to add the EOs a little in advance to adding the clothes it didn’t seem to happen as they absorbed into the sheep balls, but sometimes I’d forget. It was very hit or miss, certainly not often, but enough that it annoyed me.
: The smell just didn’t last. As it shouldn’t, these are natural, volatile substances that I was subjecting to high heat. Of course the scent didn’t last. I consider my EOs precious, natural resources, and having to add so frequently to maintain a scent seemed wasteful to me. Although I could smell it in the laundry room and in the dryer, it didn’t seem to cling to the clothes that much.
My solution was to simply use an after-drying linen spray. Give the pile of clean clothes in the basket a few spritzes as desired, done. No fire hazard, no staining (because my linen sprays are properly diluted and preserved), and the smell lingered longer. No muss, no fuss.
If you want to make your own linen spray, there’s a recipe on my site in my DIY pictures here.
So, hardly ever do I anoint my balls anymore, but I still love ‘em! And I feel good about my health choices getting away from the nasty dryer sheets. And thanks to my cousin I got some awfully cute ones for Christmas pictured below! When the old flock wears out (which could take a while, these suckers last YEARS) I’ve got some seriously adorable backups waiting in the wings.
Also, if you’re bored, may I suggest reading up on spontaneous combustion? It’s a wild world out there, including the mystery of spontaneous human combustion, and you’ll read sentences like “pork flesh was marinated in acetone to make full-scale replicas of humans, clothed, and set alight. They burned to ash within 30 minutes.”
I mean, those are people just doing their jobs. Conducting importance research, dressing up pork like humans and setting it ablaze. It’s just unreal. If you’re feeling lost in your career, and perhaps have some pyromaniac tendencies, know there is a wide world of opportunities out there!