Jean Lab

We did our first lab of the year in which we tried to find what composition of water and bleach, faded jeans the best. We concluded from our experiment that 12.5% bleach was the best option because it had the best fade with the least fabric damage. We rated the fabric damage and the color removal from a scale from 1 to 10. We had three jean squares and we rated each and took the average. We used the following concentrations: 0% (control), 12.5%, 25%, 50%, 100%. We chose the 12.5% because it had a good color removal number and the lowest fabric damage other than water. We also had to qualitatively see which one was the best and the 12.5% had a really good fade.

Although we reached a reasonable conclusion from the data, it had many errors in it that could have influenced the result. One was that are timing was pretty bad and we changed how we counted time from the beginning to the end. The main one was that we only started the clock when it was completely submerged in the bleach. We didn't do this in the beginning but we started doing this which increased the time and probably influenced our results. This might be one reason why the 100% bleach didn't have a good fade even though it should have been the strongest. Another major problem with our experiment was that we didn't use the same type of jeans so some of them were already darker and lighter than each other. This definitely impacted our results because some of the data is very inconsistent and doesn't make sense like the stronger bleaches having less of an effect because the jeans were darker. The final error that was probably made during this experiment was that all of it is personal opinion. The number we assign each pair of jeans isn't based on anything so if another group were try this again, they would get different numbers and a different result even if the experiment was replicated perfectly. If someone else were to do this experiment, I would have two recommendations. My first recommendation is to  plan the timing ahead of time so that you know what to do when you are doing the experiment and changing anything while the experiment is going on. My second recommendation would be to use the same pair of jeans for all the jean squares so that everything is consistent. Also you should take pictures as a before and after. 

The purpose of the experiment is to find the best composition of water and bleach to fade pants without resulting in too much damage. I learned that having a constant environment is very important to science experiments which helps better helps me understand how to have a good lab. This lab could actually be used in real every day life if I wanted to fade my jeans. This is a popular fashion trend so people could know the best ratio of water to bleach when fading their jeans. In conclusion, even though this lab was a success, we had many variables that we didn't control which could have affected the experiment. We learned a lot from this experiment and this will help us for the next time we do a lab.