When you take your morning shower, you may have noticed how the shower curtain sometimes seems attracted to you. While you try to escape the first seconds of ice cold water spraying all over your sleepy cold body, you somehow get a feeling that the shower curtain is closing in on you.

It is as if something or someone is right outside the curtain, slowly wrapping it around you, as if to engulf and suffocate you. Sometimes the wet and cold curtain will cling to your body and your legs much like strange women do when you’re just married. Images from the worst horror movies flash before your eyes as you wrestle and hope that it was only a draft or something this time too… too late! You’re all wrapped up. You try to escape but the only thing you manage is to topple over the shampoo bottle. Scary stuff indeed.

This is perfectly normal, and nothing to be afraid of, it turns out. This phenomenon has been discussed by drunken physicists for decades, but it’s always been a strictly theoretical discussion. Some blame the Bernoulli Effect, which is used for describing why airplanes can fly while others claim that it because of some kind of buoyancy effect, meaning that hot air will rise and produce a pressure difference that will account for the shower-curtain’s mad clings. Well, obviously this is wrong, since the darn curtain starts clinging even before the water is even starting to be hot!

What really happens in that shower is that the water stream creates a vortex of air, which rotates horizontally. The eye of the vortex (that’s where YOU are) is at lower pressure than the surrounding room and the rest of the vortex. Think of it as a cyclone. This low pressure virtually sucks the shower curtain right into the center of the vortex, which as I said, is where YOU are!!!

One way to avoid this is to shower under lower water flow, so that the vortex doesn’t get strong enough. Another solution is to acquire an industrial strength shower curtain, not easily affected by tiny household showers but then, how do you keep the curtain clean and mold-free?? Not to mention they are ugly as hell.

But don’t despair. Finally, there’s a device to put an end to that dreaded attack of the moldy shower curtain once and for all. That mysterious physics-defying principle, the shower cling effect, has finally been defeated by the ShowerBow, a flexible bow attached to a 1-pound pivoting weight, holding that slimy piece of plastic away from you and giving you 25% more room to dance, play water sports with a friend, and maybe even do some jumping jacks in there.