From our other sites
The story
Bras Obara (34), a Russian-born TV personality raised in Himeji City, Hyogo, posted his views on fabric softener on social media on September 28. He explained that he personally avoids fabric softener because it causes mold in the washing machine drum and reduces towels’ water absorption, then posed the question: “Don’t people who hate fabric softener hate it so much that a lot of them are basically extremists?” The post sparked a thread on 5ch’s Entertainment & Sports News+ board, where opinions clashed — from sympathy for people sensitive to strong scents, to complaints aimed at people who overdo it with the stuff.
Mon 9/28, 9:58 AM
Bras Obara (34), a Russian-born columnist and TV personality raised in Himeji City, Hyogo, updated his Threads account on the 28th with his personal take on using fabric softener.
“Personally, I don’t use fabric softener because it causes mold in the washing machine and makes towels less absorbent… but don’t people who are anti-fabric-softener hate it so much that a lot of them are basically extremists?” he wrote.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Same with people who turn it into some big debate.
Some people literally gag from the smell of fabric softener.
As an adult, I caught a whiff of Fa Fa fabric softener (a popular Japanese brand) and it was the exact same smell.
Maybe his parents used Fa Fa, and that smell is what got him bullied all along.
Even folks who don't mind other detergents or air fresheners say fabric softener makes them feel sick.
Apparently foreigners find Japanese people's obsession with being odorless bizarre.
Though I'll give it credit for stopping static cling.
Honestly closer to body odor than anything else.
some brands separate from the water if you just let the bottle sit.
Then if you shake it before using, it foams up and gets hard to pour.
Somebody fix that already.
It's really something you can't understand unless it's happened to you.
They once got so nauseous in a crowded room they had to rush to the bathroom.
Allergies are no joke.
Apparently it feels like someone's literally choking you (´・ω・｀)
Might be mixing with body odor too?
Either way, it's rank.
There was also this one time it smelled cheap and artificial in a different way — maybe a room fragrance spray.
When someone whose nose is already ruined causes fragrance pollution, it's genuinely brutal.
Re: #72
Switching to unscented fabric softener or a citric acid rinse would solve the fragrance-pollution problem, I'd think.
Maybe push that angle instead.
Oh, maybe that's less like sweat and more like the smell mixing with grime in the washing machine drum.
Background and key points of this debate
In recent years the term “kōgai” (香害, a pun on 公害 meaning “pollution,” used for fragrance-related health complaints) has spread in discussions around fabric softener, with Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency and the National Consumer Affairs Center fielding complaints about health issues caused by scented detergents and softeners. In the thread, voices sympathetic to people sensitive to smells clashed with those who dismissed that sensitivity as “oversensitive” or “pathological,” with no clear resolution in sight. While Obara’s original post was aimed at poking fun at anti-fabric-softener people, most of the actual replies were grounded in real experiences from both users and non-users — it wasn’t really a simple two-sided fight. Worth noting too: scent preference and medically recognized chemical sensitivity are two different things, and the thread often blurred the line between them.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Entertainment & Sports News+) thread “34-year-old talent Bras Obara: ‘Aren’t anti-fabric-softener people kind of extreme?’ sparks backlash: ‘Way too sensitive… that’s your problem’.”
Leave a Reply