Read on, dear reader...

•• What it is ••
The Shout Color Catcher is quite simply, a thick piece of cloth that you toss in your washing machine. This piece of paper is designed to absorb any stray colors that clothing may leak into the water, thereby protecting other pieces of clothing from soaking up the stray pigment.

•• Features and Commentary ••
The Shout Color Catcher comes in a box of 24. This isn't a large amount, but this isn't a product that needs to be used in every load. Save it for those loads that are full of newer clothing with lots of colors.

The product is a little smaller than a piece of typing paper, but thick and almost cloth-like. It has a pleasant scent, but a very light one. This is not a cleaner or fabric softener so the only reason for the scent is to make it pleasing to use. Apparently all laundry-related items must have a clean linen scent. Thankfully this scent is so light, it's almost unnoticeable.

In order to accurately test the product, you need the test subject and the control. In this case, the control is a white sock generously donated by myself. Luckily, the sock had a hole, so it was not great loss.

The test environment consisted of my son's new X-men underwear. While most of the color on the new underwear is screen-printed and therefore won't bleed, the underwear itself is made of several dark colors including red and black. I tossed in a color catcher and the control sock and washed the load on normal. After the cycle ended, we threw the entire thing into the dryer. Per the instructions, the Color catcher is dryer safe and we figured it was a good idea in case the colors wanted to bleed in the dryer. In hindsight, that is kind of dumb logic, but whatever.

When all was said and done, we looked at the color catcher. There indeed was a little bit of color on the product. Not a lot, but some. The logic says that if there was some on that, then there would be some on the control sock. But sure enough, it was white. It had not absorbed any of the stray pigment. This leads us to the conclusion that the color catcher worked.

But really, who cares? This was a load of color laundry and the amount of pigment caught was slight. So if it had spread onto the other clothing, there's no way anyone would notice. So what is this product for? The Color Catcher is ideal for clothing with lots bleed: tie-dye, new towels and even as a precaution for delicates whites in case a red sock gets tossed in accidentally.

To test the tie-dye theory, we were lucky in that my son had an art project in school where he made a tie-dye shirt. We put that along with my wife's pink bathrobe into the same wash with the Color Catcher and the control sock. After the wash, the Color Catcher had a fair amount of green and pink pigment. This is a much better use of the product, because previously we would have had to wash them separately. So perhaps the Color Catcher gives you more freedom to be careless with your laundry sorting!
The only complaint I have is that they are single use. I see no reason why a color catcher that was used in a load that did not require it could not be used again in another load. But the instructions say not to and my wife follows instructions. Therefore, *I* follow instructions as well.

•• Conclusion ••
The color catcher works as expected by absorbing stray color, but unless you do lots of laundry with died clothes, no need to use it every time.

Recommended:
Yes