Wool Wash: Purchase and Product Reviews

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I ran out of wool wash.  Now for some peo­ple that would be no big deal.  But in my house­hold, run­ning out of wool wash is akin to run­ning out of toi­let paper.  Okay, well maybe that’s not a good anal­ogy.  It’s like run­ning out of tooth­paste or sham­poo or some other daily-use product.

No, I don’t really use wool wash every sin­gle day but I use it on a reg­u­lar basis and run­ning out was not good — though I didn’t real­ize at the time exactly how “not good” it would turn out to be.

A day or two after I used the last of the wool wash, I picked up the phone and called my local yarn store.  The same store where I’ve been pur­chas­ing wool and wool wash for the past 17+ years.  I wanted to con­firm that they had wool wash in stock because the plan was to pur­chase a bot­tle over the phone and then send The Hus­band, whose office is just a few blocks away from said wool store, over to for an in-and-out no-complications pick-up.  [Yes, I’d called The Hus­band before­hand and made sure he was okay run­ning the errand.]

I can­not tell you how utterly dis­ap­pointed I was, how flum­moxed I was, how shaken to the roots I was, how dev­asted I was to hear that my wool store no longer car­ried the same brand of wool wash.  What!?! I really, really liked the Eucalan wool wash I’d been using.  Really, really liked it. Loved the smell.  Loved how soft it made my woolens.  Loved the fact that I suf­fered not a sin­gle moth hole while using Eucalan.

I had no desire to change brands.  But I needed wool wash.  So I went online and looked for local sources.  Came up empty.  Then I looked into order­ing a bot­tle but ship­ping costs scared me off.

Even­tu­ally (Thurs­day, 01/22/09) I gave in and stopped by the yarn store and picked up a bot­tle of their cur­rent wool wash brand, Kook­aburra, for $12.86.  The store owner spoke very highly of the prod­uct (Kook­aburra Wash with Tea Tree oil and Lano­lin) and I was des­per­ate so I took a leap of faith.  And fell off the cliff.

Look, I don’t par­tic­u­larly like writ­ing neg­a­tive reviews — espe­cially about prod­ucts offered by small, family-run com­pa­nies.  I had every expec­ta­tion of lik­ing the prod­uct, after all it came highly rec­om­mended from a trusted source.  But hon­estly, I hate this stuff.  I hate the smell.  Hate with a cap­i­tal H.  And the feel of my woolens isn’t awful, but it’s cer­tainly not the soft, snug­gly feel pro­duced by the Eucalan.

Did I men­tion I hate the smell?  Kind of a sour, sweaty body odor.  Who wants their woolens to start off smelling bad?  To be hon­est, the smell has dis­si­pated now — after three days of hang­ing on the dry­ing rack in the basement.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with the rest of the bot­tle but I won’t be using it myself.  Maybe I’ll take it back to the wool store and donate it for their use.  I’ll also be order­ing a bot­tle of Eucalan.  A big bot­tle.  Or maybe even two.  And I’ll make sure I never run out again.

Related posts:

1. $$: Dec 9 — Recy­cling on the Cheap
2. Day 216: Tow­els, Make-up, Lotion, and Groceries
3. Day 87: Gas, Gro­ceries, and Gifts
4. Day 148: Reli­gion, Pol­i­tics, & Food