Mystery of missing socks solved

[caption id="attachment_226165" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Leading scientists have solved the mystery of missing socks[/caption]

One of life’s greatest domestic mysteries – why socks go missing in the wash – has been solved by leading scientists in a new study in the UK.

After all, many of us keep that one of each sock in our wardrobe in the faint hope that one day the other will turn up. But why is it that even after a year of no shows, we insist on keeping those single socks?

Probably because the moment you throw one of them out, the other is guaranteed to re-appear. But how did it come to be that we all suffer the same fate of forgetting, misplacing and losing our socks one at a time and almost never the same pair at the same time?

Leading scientists have now unravelled the cause and their research has led them to devise a mathematical formula to predict the probability of ending up with odd socks after a washing load spinning cycle.

The study, commissioned by Samsung for a washing machine launch, surveyed 2 000 people living in Britain who were representative of global population groups and happy to discuss their dirty laundry in public.

Through a series of in-depth face-to-face interviews, it found that the participants lose an average of 1.3 socks each month (and more than 15 in a year), leaving them with numerous mismatches.

If the average life expectancy is 81, these cleaning catastrophes lead to the equivalent of 1 264 lost socks each over a lifetime, costing the average study participant a whopping R43 198.21.

In all, these laundry losses mean about 84 million socks go missing every month in the UK alone.

Chartered psychologist Dr Simon Moore and statistician Geoff Ellis applied science to socks in a bid to discover the factors which contribute to washday blues.

Many fanciful theories have been put forward for these laundry losses, including theft by gremlins, but the team’s work ultimately revealed:

•  The main factors causing missing socks are the complexity of the washing load.

The way the batches are divided up, based on whites, colours and different temperatures and the number of socks in each wash cycle.

• There are many practical reasons for sock loss.

Research interviews found the common causes included items falling behind radiators or under furniture without anyone realising; stray items being added to the wrong coloured wash or separated from its matching sock; not being properly secured to a washing line or they are simply carelessly paired up.