Pool urine dye

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It is a common myth that there is some chemical put in pools that will change color when someone urinates in the pool. This is commonly told to people, especially children, to discourage them from urinating in the pool. It doesn't really exist, unfortunately.

A chemical could be made that reacts to urine and changes color, but the problem is that it would react to other stuff too and create lots of embarrassing false positives.

When I was a kid, the adults would give each of us a bag of M&Ms, sorted by color, before we could go into the pool.

Then they would warn us that they would know who peed in the pool by what color the water turned.

We didn't fully believe them, but no one ever tested the claim (to my knowledge), until I secretly switched colors with one of my sisters . . .

There is currently a TV ad running for "Pretty Litter" The litter changes color; red for the detection of blood; orange for kidney stones; dark yellow/olive green for normal; and blue /dark green for an UTI. Couldn't similar technology be used for detecting urine in pools?

No one ever told me about this. I can't remember ever wanting to pee in a pool though.

It already exists, but would also react to people's sweat.  Also, normal pool treatments almost immediately produce chloramines when pool chlorine comes in contact with sweat and urine.  This results in the "pool smell" you experience at most public (and some private) pools.

We would normally do a "shock" treatment of the pool on the Monday after a weekend pool party to eliminate the pool smell, algae, and any remaining fecal matter so we could start using it again on Tuesday.

Did you know that untreated home spas ("Hot Tubs") can spread UTIs and yeast infections?  They too should receive some form of chlorination, before and after each use, and especially when emptied and refilled.

I think some chromogen might be found that visualised the urine stream. If it also reacted with sweat, presumably that would just show as a faint aura around the swimmer rather than a strong colour around the offender's nether regions. Though the idea might be just to colour the entire pool when a certain concentration of urine was reached, so that everybody could get out immediately. But that wouldn't nail the culprit. In fact it might encourage them if they liked causing trouble without getting caught.

But I'm wary of chemicals and dyes. They legally put them into a lot of processed food and drink even though the safety is questionable. If they'll add those things to food for purely cosmetic reasons, I guess they'd be even less reluctant to put them in bathing water for policing mildly dangerous emissions of urine. So maybe it's a good thing they haven't found a "suitable" chemical yet.

Rather than using chemicals, some kind of physical peeing monitor gizmo might do a safer job. Maybe it could be based on the refraction of light around the urine stream, or some kind of temperature differential detection. Or maybe there's some aquatic animal that feeds on urea, so that as soon as anybody peed, they'd be surrounded by a swarm of the little beasts. If a suitable natural species doesn't exist, genetic engineering might be able to create one. Probably a bad idea though. Just thinking outside the box.

The thing is that the substance would react to everybody's sweat -- the entire pool would turn some hideous shade that would inspire some people to forgo swimming altogether.

As an experiment, fill a shot glass with water, the add a single drop of each colour found in a watercolour paint set.

My experiment resulted in a shot glass full of murky brownish-grey water.  A pool full of this stuff would drive me away.

So if there's any hope, it probably lies with the urine-gobbling fish.

Personally I don't see why anyone would want to shame someone for having incontinence. Time might be better spent finding dye to identify and arrest people for spreading other types of bodily fluid (e.g., sperm) where they aren't wanted.

The prospect of accidental urination puts a new angle the issue. I don't think anybody here meant to advocate incontinence-shaming. Whether or not to expect such people to stay out of a pool, the mind boggles at that question.

There are worse things in the world than peeing in pools, I think we all know that.

Sorry. I didn't mean that you guys were shaming anyone and I'm not trying to be a buzzkill.

It's just that the "peeing in pools" thing has been a trope all my life, having grown up with swimming pools and hearing people joke about it or discuss "dyes" all the time.

I also have a thing for pool chemicals so I know the urine would be neutralized on contact.

Idk I just always figured if I go swimming I could be swimming in Clorine water with pee as well, but it never put me of going swimming I just try not to get a mouthful.

There's no question as to which colour my pee would be because I would have gotten the green M&Ms.