clean laundry shouldn't smell like laundry
it's supposed to smell like nothing.
how does your sense of smell work? you know this.
your nose can detect traces of some chemical or another floating through the air. you’re used to the regular air chemicals, they don’t smell like anything. if you smell the air near your laundry, you are smelling some chemicals that are in your laundry.
if your laundry comes out smelling like “clean laundry,” it is not clean; there are chemicals on it that you can very clearly detect, by smelling them.
sometimes this is a result of problems with the way you washed your clothes, or some bacteria in your washing machine. but often times, it comes from your detergent.
detergent companies know you like to think that you can smell how clean your laundry is. like we just discussed, you can’t, but you didn’t realize that a minute ago, did you? most people think, oh, fresh laundry smell, great, thanks detergent company. That, or lavender, or some other pleasant smell. but that’s not why you did your laundry, is it?
you wanted it clean. they put fragrances in your laundry to make you smell it and think they did something good, but the fragrances are still in your clothes. They’re stuck on there. that’s not what you wanted.
some of these fragrances can be harmless. some can bother your skin, especially if you have sensitive skin. but you know what else? they also leave a subtle scent in your clothes as you walk around. you don’t want to smell faintly like laundry through the day, do you? if you did, you could buy a bottle of laundry-scented perfume.
and generally, that’s how you should approach fragrance. The only place you need your fragrance is in a bottle of fragrance. that scent will last a long time; eight hours, maybe, as opposed to the length of your laundry detergent, body wash, shampoo, hand soap—all of these fragrances last various amounts of time, which is annoying if you’re trying to figure out what you want to smell like today; if your fragrance is several layers of random shit on top of your actual fragrance, and it all fades at different rates, you have no idea what you’re going to smell like ten minutes from now.
a bottled fragrance as your only fragrance is a controlled thing. it’s great. having everything else fragrance-free means you get to avoid useless chemicals that might irritate your skin (or might not. remember, chemical doesn’t mean bad. everything is a chemical. water is a chemical).
so… uh, yeah, buy unscented laundry detergent. and everything else.