The closest experience I’ve ever had to discovering “the vitamin” was buying a 100% wool outfit and wearing it in the winter.
Not only was I not freezing anymore, I was not sweating and overheating either. The horrible sensory nightmare of winter clothes disappeared.
In particular, I bought a pair of wool pants. They were a thrifted pair of fancy dress pants like you would wear at an important office job, and they were easily the most comfortable pair of winter-appropriate pants i’d ever worn. I wore them Every Single Day.
From that point on I realized a lot of my clothes were making me feel bad, and the common thread was polyester. Especially polyester blends.
It’s a trap because the polyester clothes are the ones that always feel sooooo silky soft when they are in the store, whereas cotton, linen and wool can feel comparatively rough and scratchy. But when actually wearing them for hours throughout the day, it’s the natural fibers that feel more comfortable.
Maybe the secret to sensory comfort is not about the presence of softness, but the absence of overloading sensations. Or maybe the sensory stress and agony is not triggered by texture of the fabric, but by how it breathes and regulates temperature.
Then there’s the problem of clothing life span: polyester blends, no matter how soft they seem at first, become rough and scratchy and covered in hard, itchy pills after wearing them 10 or 20 times, whether or not they have been tumble-dried or even washed at all. (I tested it!) Linen and cotton become softer and more comfy the more you wear them, polyester but ESPECIALLY polyester blends become a constant stressor. Polyester blend t-shirts I used to love for their softness now feel bristly and irritating.
So now I’m trying to change my wardrobe to as many natural fibers as possible, and the more natural fiber clothes i have the more I realize that the plastic fibers stress me out. It’s so easy to overheat or freeze in them and they’re always degrading and becoming less comfortable and it sucks.
A lot of wool items are scratchy but some of them are not. There’s a whole spectrum of scratchiness and I haven’t figured out what the commonality is. I bought one wool sweater that is 100% too scratchy to wear without an under-layer (and haven’t worn it yet), and a different wool sweater that is soooo cozy and comfy and not scratchy at all.
Why is wool so unpopular? My professor was talking about how the school used to keep a herd of sheep for educational purposes but wound up selling them because the wool was so worthless they ended up using it to mulch greenhouse plants. Wool is a miracle. I love you wool thank you sheep
like sure I also hate polyester for the environmental impacts (its a huge part of microplastics) but isn’t it infuriating that this environmentally harmful material we are using everywhere also just…sucks way worse than the natural alternatives