Anyone remember that scourge of mankind, ring around the collar? My kid last night asked me what it was, and I was sort of hard put to say, except to tell her that it was a leprous affliction that disappeared with the 1970s.
Long story short, I’m founding a Society for the Scientific Understanding and Preservation of Ring Around the Collar, and I’ll award an honororary lifetime membership to anyone who call tell me what the heck ring around the collar is in the first place.
Don’t know. But maybe fewer people are wearing ties now than in the '70s, or maybe it was related to Brylcream or whatever guys were putting on their hair then?
I wonder if it didn’t have anything to do w/ the previously frequent use of greasy kid stuff, Brylcreem, Vitalis, etc. Do I remember correctly that those ads proclaiming something along the lines of “Wet is dead, the dry look is in” roughly corresponded chronologically with the disappearance of “the ring”?
Sal Ammoniac, having fought your kid’s ignorance, could you now fight mine?
I always took it to be the grey tidemark you get on the inner collar band if you wear your shirt too many days in a row, or don’t wash the collar thoroughly enough.
Am I close? For some reason, I now have a burning desire to clear up this question which has been nagging at me (very vaguely) for the last 25 years or so.
Maybe the surfactants in laundry soap are just vastly better now. Could be that whatever used to accumulate before to the point of visibility despite frequent washings now is completely dispatched with a single wash.
From Google, I bring you ring around the collar. I don’t think it’s noticed so much anymore because fewer men wear ties every day.
Surok, that sounds about right. FWIW, as a kid I had to wear white uniform blouses, and “ring around the collar” was a problem with them, too. Hence the raison d’etre of Wisk (“Wisk starts to clean before you start to wash!”). It was mostly an issue in warm weather, though, when the back of my neck would get sweaty and grubby.
I wonder if it isn’t a combination of better detergent formulations, less hair goop drainage and pretreatment of clothing (to make it stain or wrinkle-resistant) that makes it less of a problem these days. Or maybe folks just wash their necks more thoroughly. 
Well, er… ahem… I don’t actually know. I’ve never seen RATC* in vivo*. Back during the RATC plague years, I never wore that kind of collar.
When I launder my shirts I always spray the inside of the collar with* Sard Wonder Spray*. i am amazed that anyone could not get dirty collars.
Ring around the collar still exists. As does skunky stripe inside the French cuffs. Neither is the scourge of our age, however, because we have the technology to combat them.
This ad explains the dreaded RATC.
Remember, only YOU can prevent RATC.
.
That’s an ancient Chinese secret.
What happened to it? It regrouped, found my closet, and attatched itself to my shirts. I have it on all white and light-colored work shirts. I don’t wear ties but have it anyway. It takes periodic pre-wash scrubbing to combat it, and although it improves drastically, it never really goes away.
I wash my neck daily, by the way, and work in an office environment. So it’s not like I’m out on the oil rig, or anything.
Okay, membership packets in the mail for McNew and don’t ask!
In a bygone era, men wore white dress shirts more frequently, a la the stereotypical engineer (with short sleeves, of course). That, coupled with more casual attire AND more colored shirts, might help account for the RATC drop. Also, I don’t think there’s as much of the wifely-pride-in-the-freshly-pressed-husband’s-dress-shirt stereotype in ads any more.
I have noticed ring around my own collar in white shirts, especially those I have to iron. I work in an office and don’t do anything grungy all day, so I tend to wear those shirts several time before washing. Thus arises RATC.
The RATC! The RATC! It burrrrrrns!!!
RATC was a convenient marketing hook for Wisk detergent. Collar rings still exist, but Wisk’s ad agency had the brilliant idea of making it something that differentiated their brand. Since Wisk was a liquid when most detergents were powders, it could be poured directly on collar stains. I doubt it did any more to remove them than any other detergent, but by taking one clear example and banging the hell with it, Wisk made itself stand out. The RATC campaign ran for years, and was probably the longest running set of themed TV ads ever.
I was under the impression that the entire point of the RATC campaign was to make housewives panic that they were taking insufficient care of their husbands, and if they didn’t swiftly change their ways, would face dire consequences.
“What? You DARE to presume I would wear this grubby shirt? … I am leaving you for a more womanly wife, right now.”
Didn’t you know? The original strain of RATC was wiped out in the wild by the World Health Organisation along with smallpox back in the eighties. The only surviving examples of this RATC are on two shirts kept frozen in liquid nitrogen in class-4 labs in Atlanta, USA, and Novosibirsk, Russia.
There has been some controversy about this. Many laundry-health organisations want to destroy those two final shirts and rid the world of the contagion permanently; others want to keep them as a resource for developing new detergents lest a new variant of RATC evolve. The issue remains unresolved.
There have been reports that the lab is Novosibirsk has had trouble paying its electricity bill lately, and the power supplier has threatened to cut off service. If so, the contagion might be released, and a world with little resistance would be deluged with RATC once again. The FSB has gotten involved, and at one point Putin threatened to nationalise the power company.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the possible increased use of air conditioning. It times back, you might spend eight to ten hours in temperatures possibly in the 80’s, nowadays it’s more likely to be closer to 70.