The Big Brother Mzansi Housemates have received their first Task for the day, and it may cause a serious problem in winning the 100% Wager Task for the week.

When Libo read out the Task brief from Biggie, it quickly became apparent that the DIY theme of the week would play a huge part today. To recap, the Wager Task for the week requires the Housemates to create outfits from scratch using eco-friendly materials, and today’s Task feeds into that.

According to the day’s brief, the Housemates must create their own “patterns, designs and colour using an eco-friendly material with eco-friendly dyes.” So far, so good.

The catch is that the Housemates will have to create the dyes in question, using fruit, spices and vegetables. In other words, the Housemates are going to have to break out some industrial chemistry.

Compounding the predicament is the fact that the material they dye today must be used in the outfits they create for Thursday’s Wager Task Presentation – so failure today will make success on Thursday that much harder, placing their 100% Wager in jeopardy.

The process of textile dyeing does, of course, have a long history – approximately 12,000 years, which places it in the late Stone Age. While some famous dyes have been created from animal products – Tyrian purple and crimson kermes, for example – the vast majority are, in fact, created from non-animal sources: roots, berries, bark, leaves, wood, fungi and lichens.

Here’s the problem: those are in limited supply in Biggie’s House and – even if they were – the process required to turn them into a usable dye is complicated and often counter-intuitive.

Now, Big Brother has promised to provide them with “ingredients and materials with instructions”, which must come as a relief, but there is still a huge risk of error: get your temperatures wrong or accidentally introduce an unwanted substance, and your dye could come out the wrong color, or simply not hold to your material.

Think about it – people mess food onto clothes the whole time, and it’s not like it turns into some major deal. We wash out the stains. The thing is – dyes are dyes because they don’t wash out, and that quality requires an entire collection of processes.

What is sure is that this is going to be interesting. Any Big Brother Mzansi viewer with even a passing interest in science should be able to derive some pleasure from watching the Housemates work through the process. This should be fun, and more than just a little messy!