Oh, bad news, y’all. I switched laundry detergents and the smell is killing me. Method Fresh Air With Bleach Alternative, I absolutely hate you.
For the past four or five years I’ve been using the Pacific-Northwest-produced hippie-compliant Country Save. I could refill the box from the bulk aisle at the co-op and and bring it home and wash my clothes and feel that in terms of laundry, all was right with my world. A rare feeling, one worth cherishing, you know? I had never been tempted to stray until PCC decided to freak me out a couple of months ago by changing the layout of the store by my house, where I’ve been shopping for something like three and a half years.
You know how disorienting it is to go into a grocery store not your own, right? Let’s say you’re normally a QFC person and you have to make an emergency pit stop at Safeway for razors or granola bars or Handi-Snacks and you run around trying to figure out if they keep the granola bars in Cereals or in Baking Needs and they don’t have your kind of razors and you try to find an employee but you feel stupid asking where the honey-roasted peanuts are because invariably the employee will point past your head and there will be the sign that says something like “Feminine Products. Pet Food. Honey Roasted Peanuts. Regular Roasted Peanuts.” And you feel real dumb and then they turn out not to have honey-roasted peanuts anyway and so you have to get cashews and it’s a whole ordeal and no one wins.
Now that’s bad enough when it’s a strange alien grocery store, but when it’s your grocery store and one day you walk in and everything’s normal and you know right where the bulk olives are and right where the mac and cheese is, and the NEXT DAY you walk in and it’s just chaos…you’re walking around with a dazed expression wondering why the fizzy water isn’t in the juice aisle like it’s supposed to be with all the other non-alcoholic beverages. Now the fizzy water is by the rice cakes or something, which makes absolutely no sense, and the hot chocolate mix isn’t with the coffee anymore and heaven help you if you want to find a thing of tomato sauce because there IS NO TOMATO SAUCE FOR YOU. It’s hell. I’ve slowly adjusted to the point where I can find almost eighty percent of what I need on any given trip without having to walk up every single aisle (fortunately there are only four at this store, not including the produce rectangle) and wondering where oh where are the awesome gummy bears that they used to have?
But! My last box of Country Save had been bought before the regime change and it ran out last weekend. I managed to locate the new bulk cleaning area (right across from the dishtowels) and noticed, to my horror, that PCC no longer carries bulk powder detergent. I had my little box from 2001 and everything. I was very sad. I did not, however, do the sensible thing and just buy either a) a whole new box of Country Save, secure in the knowledge that my clothes would not stink the stink of an industrial waste dump if I did so or b) choose another type of biodegradeable hippie-compliant soap that would also not make my eyes tear up with real tears of pain and unhappiness when I get the clothes out of the dryer. Did I do either of those things? No. I thought, instead, “Hey, this will be the perfect chance to try out those cool Method bottles at Target!” I’m paying for it now.
I am not always such a sucker for packaging as I seem to have been this time around. I was genuinely amped up to do the squeeze-right-into-the-cap maneuver the ad copy on the bottle promised me I could do. I have their dish soap in Magnolia even though I wanted Mandarin and it’s been just dandy. I was also suckered in by the “bleach alternative” thing because I figured, sure, my whites could be whiter. Whose couldn’t, you know? And so I promptly put in a load of towels and promptly let them sit in the washer too long and promptly decided it would be wasteful to wash them again and so just chucked them into the dryer, rationalizing that the dryer is really hot and that that would dispel any mildewy grossness.
When the towels came out of the dryer, this…smell hit me. This smell that is making me retch just thinking about it, this smell that totally gave me a stomach-ache the other night in the middle of the night that could only be calmed with Hawaiian bread bagel. I was afraid to dry off after my shower with those towels because I had a theory that if I put the stinky disgusting horrible towel on my wet skin that somehow the stench would get into my open pores and that I would smell like Method Fresh Air With Bleach Alternative and that I would never have any friends ever again because I smelled so bad. It’s hard to describe this smell properly, you really have to smell it yourself to understand. Clearly I don’t recommend it, but if you’re curious it’s like some unholy alliance between burnt cooking oil and what happens when you don’t run the garbage disposal for a while and you get a trail of ants down there.
I held on to a brief hope that it was in fact mildew from not being assiduous enough about my laundry switching duties and ran another load…with the same stinky soap. The outcome was not favorable, to say the least. In fact preliminary testing has determined that yes, it’s the soap, the soap I hate so so so so much. I am using up all my clean washed-with-my-old-detergent clothes so as not to have that smell on me, but I can still sort of smell it if I breathe too deeply (I think I was right about the towels and the open pores). I’m planning to rectify the situation this evening but I tell you, it’s been a rough couple of days.