Do old eggs really float? We test this common “lifehack”

Listen guys, unless you have a huge surplus of pants hangers, Q-tips, dental floss and whatever weird detritus that’s often recommended, a lot of so-called “lifehacks” – those hobo techniques for saving money and/or accomplishing some inane task with “readily available” household objects – are a bit impractical, if they even work at all.

But there’s one, at least, that seems like it could perfectly epitomize the intended convenience of the lifehack: Testing the freshness of eggs by just dropping them into a cup of water. We’ve all got water and a cup on hand and, so long as you’re a sentient human being and not, like, a family dog reading this on your owner’s tablet after you taught yourself English.

But does this egg trick really work? Impressed at having actually found a real, potentially useful lifehack, we took it upon ourselves to test it out. Here’s what we found.

First, let’s cover the basic idea behind this lifehack. According to multiple sources, eggs of varying freshness will float to various different degrees in a cup of water. The freshest of eggs will apparently sink down and land sideways on the bottom of a glass, while eggs of moderate freshness will sort of half-stand, half-sink, and a stale egg will stand on end at the bottom of a glass. A totally bad egg will, the wisdom goes, float at the surface of the water.

Like so:

View post on imgur.com

While we’ve seen videos and commentary on the Internet that this method objectively does not work, the American Department of Agriculture apparently enthusiastically endorses it as a bulletproof test of egg freshness. Well, what better outlet to put the debate to bed than a random Asia news website, we thought.

Arming ourselves with a calendar (so you know we’re not cheating), and a pair of eggs – one completely fresh and one a few days past its best-by date, we set to work. We plunked our eggs into two cups of tap water and, lo and behold, the old egg did, in fact, float to the surface.

We found the effect to be even more pronounced when we used salt water, as the slightly increased buoyancy made the old egg really bob exaggeratedly to the surface.

The official explanation, apparently, for this phenomenon is that air pockets in the eggs expand as the eggs get older, making them more buoyant and smelly.

Go figure. We had always assumed that old eggs float because the now fully-formed embryo inside was doing its best to tread water.

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