I made christmas disappear!
December 19, 2008 1:33 PM   Subscribe

Is there any way to make ink re-emerge from a soaked receipt? Besides magic?

Last night, my husband and I dumped a year's worth of coins into a Coinstar machine, and took the sum (around $100) in amazon.com gift certificates. Well, my husband left the receipts in his pants, and I washed the pants today. You can guess what happened.

I can make out some of the numbers/letters of the codes for reclaiming the sum on amazon, but others, not so much. Is there any way to make the ink... re-emerge?

HELP HELP
posted by changeling to Grab Bag (4 answers total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: removed at poster's request -- mathowie

 
The first thing I would try is a black light.
posted by Brian James at 2:02 PM on December 19, 2008


Besides calling CSI, all I can think of is scanning the paper and using Photoshop (or something like it) to increase contrast and play with the levels to see if you can bring anything up.

Also, it's possible that Coinstar can give you a duplicate. They certainly have the information in their database.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 2:13 PM on December 19, 2008


You should keep in mind it might not even be ink, a lot of reciepts are printed on thermal paper and can fade naturally over time anyway. What type of printing it is will effect what you have to do to recover it.
posted by tiamat at 2:25 PM on December 19, 2008


agree with scanning/photoshop
posted by desjardins at 4:17 PM on December 19, 2008


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