Glass Shower Doors Can Sometimes Explode During Showers

If you're someone who is just browsing TikTok looking for something new to be anxious about, then you're in luck! In a series of videos posted across the platform, users are claiming that shower doors randomly exploded in the middle of their shower, leading to predictably horrifying results for their naked bodies.

Following the news that shower doors can explode, and that this happens with some level of frequency, many naturally wanted to learn more about the phenomenon. After all, if shower doors can randomly explode, what's to keep them from exploding on you? Here's everything we know about why this happens.

Shower doors can explode both when you're in the shower and when you aren't. In fact, some homeowners claim that they were woken up in the middle of the night by the noise of their door exploding spontaneously.

Naturally, when these stories first started circulating, there was plenty of skepticism. Glass doesn't explode all by itself, so there must be some other explanation.

What united all of these stories was that the glass didn't crack, but seemed to shatter and that it happened spontaneously, without the glass moving or falling out of its frame.

While there's unfortunately no conclusive explanation for what's causing this, there are several established theories that may explain a situation where a glass door seems to just spontaneously shatter.

One theory is that, if the glass is chipped or cracked in a way that may not even be visible when it's first installed, usually by a screw, that may cause the glass to shatter at some point as it reacts to variations in temperature, particularly in extreme temperatures. Even the vibration caused by noise could set the glass off as it expands and contracts related the environment around it.

It's also possible that the glass shatters because of a defect known as nickel sulfide inclusion, which occurs during manufacturing. When a piece of foreign material is inadvertently included in the glass, it can cause the glass to shatter without any apparent explanation.

Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do about either of these problems besides replace your glass door with a shower curtain.

Although it's obviously terrible for a glass door to shatter, especially while someone is showering, the stories of this happening are still quite rare. On top of that, it also seems that glass shower screens that have a frame are less like to break than ones without it.

If you're really concerned about it, though, the best thing to do is to replace your glass shower door with some other type of screen.

Hopefully, though, this problem will be resolved so that it doesn't affect any more people. Shower screens can be installed for years at a time, which makes the fear that one will just spontaneously break all the more urgent for those who have that type of screen.