During my
military service, I had several encounters with car
battery acid. This is a weak
sulphuric acid. When using
El-Cheapo Batteries, you need to keep topping them up with
distilled water. Our batteries took fairly heavy
wear and tear, and we had to put them into all sorts of inconvenient locations, so battery acid would often
splash about.
Now normally, when battery acid splashes somewhere, you just sprinkle something related to limestone. This is not so much for safety reasons as for the nice fizz it makes.
But every once in a while, some acid splashes onto somebody's uniform (made mainly of cotton, coloured olive green). You barely notice this, so the acid just dries out.
Now you have an olive green uniform (or a nice grey dress uniform, which is even funnier) with purple splotches all over it. Turns out that sulphuric acid reacts with the cotton and colour in this manner.
The fabric looks a bit odd now, so sooner or later somebody touches a purple spot. At that instant, the entire affected area crumbles away! A moment later, you have a beautifully holed uniform...