The first night I felt itchy and thought it was a dry skin thing. By the morning, my skin was covered in a pink rash and felt like I'd been sleeping in mosquitoes. I thought I'd developed bedbugs overnight.
After the second night, my skin was on fire and I was convinced that my next-door neighbours had infested my bedroom with some alien bugform that came through the walls and invaded my bed to torture me. Taking a shower was excruciating.
Finally, after tearing apart my bed and inspecting every inch of the mattress and platform, I figured I either had invisible microscopic multi-legged demons in my bed, or I'd developed an allergy to my bed linens. Then I remembered the dollar-store dryer sheets. I took a fresh one out of the box and rubbed it on my arm. Instant agony.
They're made of some kind of rubberised plastic and look like giant, blue pollen spores. I took them home and washed my sheets and pillowcases twice, with one extra rinse cycle to get all of the offending chemicals out. Then I tossed everything into the dryer and threw in the Dryer Balls.
The first thing I noticed was the muffled banging noise as the dryer ran through the cycle. Mildly annoying, but not too bad. I had set the timer for 40 minutes instead of the usual 60, because the package claimed that my laundry would dry in less time (therefore saving even more money on energy costs).
At the end of the cycle I discovered that yes, the load of fitted sheet, flat sheet, and four pillowcases was totally dry. They also looked poofier than usual, as if the Dryer Balls had beaten air into the cotton fibres. They were slightly less wrinkled than usual, and I noticed that there was no static, which was kind of a big deal since I live in an extremely dry climate and I usually have very serious static in the laundry if I don't use liquid fabric softener or dryer sheets.
I put the sheets back on the bed, and they were at least as soft as fabric softener would have made them, but without the weird oily film that it can leave. Encouraged, I tried the Dryer Balls with a load of bath towels.
The result was quite dramatic. They came out so fluffy that the stack of folded towels was almost too fat to fit on the linen closet shelf! I also noticed a measurable increase in absorbency and a decrease in lint fuzz - my lint screen in the dryer had caught far more lint than usual, but the towels were left fluffy-soft and almost totally lint-free.
I am very pleased with the performance of the Dryer-Max Dryer Balls and would highly recommend this product, especially to anyone who has skin sensitivity to chemical fabric softening agents.
