It’s heartbreaking. You pull your favorite shirt from the wash, one you washed dozens of times before, but for some reason, this time, this wash ruined it. It shrunk.

You didn’t gain any weight; your frame is the same. This dryer, this infernal machine, turned your favorite, most comfortable shirt into a tube top. Science might finally be able to explain why that’s happening, and how to reverse it.

Writing in The Conversation, Nisa Salim, an engineer specializing in materials and composites, notes that most of our clothes are made from plant-based fibers like cotton and linen, which are composed of microscopic coils of twisted cellulose chains that are straightened and locked into smooth threads during manufacturing.

But those chains have “memory.” That means the minute they get wet, heated, or tumbled in the dryer, they start to loosen up and try to return to their pre-factory state.

Here’s Why Your Clothes Keep Shrinking in the Wash

All of that agitation, combined with the hot water of the wash and not simply because of it, is making your straightened clothes want to revert to their original coiled and crinkled state, causing them to shrink.

This leads to the question you’ve probably been asking while reading this and every laundry day of your life: Can a garment be unshrunk? Yes! Sort of.

Salim suggests that you may be able to salvage a shrunken shirt by soaking it in lukewarm water with approximately one tablespoon of hair conditioner per liter of water, then letting it air dry while gently stretching it out.

Salim suggests “pegging the garment to a drying rack.” This process gradually expands the shrunken shirt to a slightly wider state, mitigating some of the shrinkage. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s better than having to toss or donate a beloved garment because it wants to revert to the tangled mess of its former, primal self.