I opened the dryer in the basement of the house I rented with four other girls in college and saw a strange blue creature sitting inside. Upon closer examination, I discovered it was a ball.
Who puts a ball in the dryer?
I had seen these strange rubber spheres with bumpy spikes on them in various homes before, but I honestly thought they were dog toys.
After finding out that they're actually a non-chemical substitute for dryer sheets and trying them myself, I've come to the conclusion that my first instinct was right and they'd be better at keeping Fido or Fluffy entertained than doing anything positive to a load of laundry.
Dryer Max Dryer Balls don't do anything. The instructions on the side of the carton of two claim that tossing them into the dryer with a load of wet clothes will "lift and separate laundry allowing hot air to flow more efficiently."
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I saw no evidence of this in my laundry, which included loads of sheets, sweaters, jeans and cotton shirts. Everything was a stuck-together, jumbled up mess.
To add insult to injury, they didn't even give my clothing the lovely lingering lavender smell that my dryer sheets do. While I suppose this could be useful for people whose skin reacts badly to those chemicals, I'd try a million different kinds of dryer sheets and then just not use anything before I would purchase these balls.
And unless you're a huge fan of washed out pastels, they don't even come in pretty colors.
They also bang around inside the dryer in a muted sort of way, and while it's the smallest issue I have with them, I worry it might annoy the people in my building who live nearest to the laundry room.
I plan on giving my balls, which I will never use again, to our crime reporter's dog, Good Hank. I know he'll enjoy them more than I did.
Grade: F
Price: $6.99 at Bed, Bath and Beyond
