What… ? Bar soap? Which coats your skin in wax and makes you feel like a walking crayon when you wash yourself with it?

No thanks, I’ll stick to my detergent and dryer sheets.

(which do work btw, I grew up poor without them and HATED the feeling of my clothes, and the static. Pissed me off all the time. Grew up, started making money, and bought dryer sheets, boom problem solved.)

Baked baking soda is used to make ramen

But it can also irritate your skin

I’m not convinced about the cost. A kilogram of borax seems to run about $10CAD. 2 cups, at 1.7g/CC, would be about 850g, so $7 just for the Borax. Unless there’s a much cheaper place to get it…

A ~5L jug of Tide costs $31, or about $6/L. If they have approximately equivalent cleaning power per volume, Tide wins.

Washing Soda

No. Just no. Sodium carbonate, you americans!

It’s worth wondering how much fabric softener would cost someone over their adult lifetime as an exercise. Let’s say 50 years of adulthood, and 12 bottles a year costing $10 each. That’s six grand. For something that serves no functional purpose, makes towels less effective and has an environmental impact.

So yes it’s a scam. If someone really needs to use fabric softener, at least buy a cheaper supermarket brand and use it sparingly.

Fabric softener is sometime useful for very hard water. You don’t have to buy it, though. You can use white vinegar to soften the water to actually soften the fabric mix in a big container one part white vinegar to one part sodium bicarbonate. Wait for it to stop foaming. Add four drops of essential oils per liter of mixture. Stir. Allow to rest a few hour before using. You can make big quantity ahead of time as long as your container is big enough for the big foam of the big batch.

Been using a set of wool dryer balls from Trader Joe’s for years. Haven’t had to use fabric softener at all.

It’s worse. Fabric softener is composed of an anti static oil. When you run it in the laundry, it coats all of your clothes with a very thin layer of oil.

Which is why towels dried with fabric softener and dryer sheets don’t absorb water anywhere near as well as plain towels dried without it!!

My mom complained to me for years that I wasn’t “doing it right” by not using fabric softener. But her towels are useless compared to mine! She continues to spends $100/ year on fabric softener while on social security. Over the year she has spent thousands and thousands of $$$. 🤦‍♀️

That homemade laundry soap made with bar soap would be a nightmare in hard water. I don’t even want to think about soap scum in the drains and in my clothes.

I just use the smallest amount of detergent I can get out of the bottle, that works well. And don’t wash a garment after wearing it once if it’s not underwear. Invested in a lot of Merino stuff which manages to be comfortable even here in Florida and doesn’t stink ever. I can wear those shirts and just hang them back up.

probably most everything is a scam if you look close enough.

It also makes the clothes extremely flammable.

Honestly at a loss here. The title references fabric softener, but the content relates more specifically to DIY laundry detergent while only mentioning that softener makes clothes more vulnerable to wear & tear. What’s the nitty-gritty on the fabric softener? Does it actually damage clothing in some way?

As geek analogy, is it like the subatomic bacteria that starts destroying the Klingon ship in Star Trek: the Next Generation S2E8’s “A Matter Of Honor”, or does it just make the material more susceptible to tearing?

If only millennials bought more fabric softener instead of avocados and coffee they would be able to afford a house.

Asking because I honestly don’t know, for the laundry detergent recipe, does it matter that I was always told to get HE detergent? I was under the impression that the soap for “high efficiency” washers was different somehow than normal soap. I am ready to admit I was conned by the detergent industry and this is just marketing speak, but I also don’t want to fuck up my washer, it cost a lot of money I don’t have to replace it.

Stubby used too much fabric softener on his jpeg.