Vogue Green

Putting the recipes here since I’m tired of having to search for those two posts on it by @prismatic-bell and (gonna say) @awfullydull.  Especially with how hard tumblr has made it to try to get to posts now.  (ex: I could not get to the posts to link them here for some reason, even though I could find them to reblog.  They will be directly after this post on my blog and are tagged laundry.)  Definitely go check them out though for all the other info and some laundry stuff I personally didn’t need.

Laundry detergent:

1 cup Borax

1 cup washing soda

½-1 cup grated bar soap (laundry bars like fels naptha or standard bar soap like ivory)

 - mix together, then use ¼ cup per load.

* For daily use during regular washing

Laundry Stripping

½ cup Borax

½ cup washing soda

½ cup grated laundry soap

- mix together and dissolve in necessary amount of warm water to submerge clothing, then soak clothes at least 8 hours, 12-24 is better.

- wring out (or do a spin cycle in washer), then wash as normal. 

* For use around once every 2-3 months or so to deep clean

(note: can sub powdered laundry detergent for laundry soap according to some other recipes I found)

Spot Treatments

Grease: Dawn dish detergent + a toothbrush to scrub

Blood: hydrogen peroxide

Ink: alcohol (rubbing or vodka)

- spot apply only to stained area and let sit 5-15 minutes before regular washing.

My roommate has a queen size Nectar mattress. Friday night, she spilled some water on the bed and took the cover off to air dry. She unzipped the cover, and a flame retardant sleeve (that we hadn’t known was there to begin with) made of woven fiberglass began shedding small fiberglass particles. They were airborne. The whole room and everything in it is contaminated, and there are few surfaces elsewhere in the apartment that don’t have at least a little. Nowhere on the mattress’ tags or on the Nectar website does it say there is a fiberglass sleeve. In fact, it makes a big deal of how there are five components: top of cover, three layers of foam, bottom of cover. Nothing about the flame retardant sleeve there. The label on the cover doesn’t say you can’t take it off, just that they suggest you don’t. It does not mention fiberglass as a material found in the mattress at all. The website even has a page explaining that you CAN take off the cover and wash it, if you must, just that they suggest you don’t. No real reasons given. No mention of fiberglass.

Our apartment is sparkly with fiberglass. We have had to drop money on a HEPA filter vacuum that could safely remove some of it, and on new non-permeable mattress covers to contain the worst of the source. We have had to garbage-bag up almost everything in her room. No amount of runs through the laundry seems to get it all out of clothes, and we have to thoroughly wipe out the washer and dryer drums every load. All her pillows were ruined, the chair in her room, her clothing, some expensive bras, a nice area rug, and I’m sure there will be trouble on the horizon with our landlord regarding the carpet, even if we do vacuum it as well as we can.

Lilly has been having nosebleeds, before the mattress was unzipped, but the worst one I’ve seen yet was the one that evening. She’s been sleeping on it almost a year, and it could have begun coming through the fabric cover. Nosebleeds are a sign of fiberglass inhalation.

We have contacted the company, and their response was honestly insulting. We were told that we shouldn’t have taken the mattress cover off to begin with, and that it can no longer be covered by the 365 night guarantee, despite us having had it for under the full year. I have just now, after three days trying, finally spoken to someone willing to look into our case, so here’s hoping we’ll get even a fraction of what we are, frankly, owed.

It really feels like there could be some sort of lawsuit here.

In fact, there is one, with a situation nearly identical to ours but with a different company. This was the first hit when I searched our problem online.

https://topclassactions.com/…/zinus-class-action-says…/

Anyway, if you have a Nectar mattress, don’t ever open the easily accessible warning-label-free zipper! If you have had it under a year, and it’s in its original condition, it can still be returned. If you were planning to get one, maybe don’t! A lot of the foam-mattress-in-a box types have the fiberglass, though most of them disclose the presence of the fiberglass rather than hiding it like a dirty secret. Make sure you do a search for mattresses WITHOUT fiberglass as a flame retardant.

My partner had changed the sheets, and then later while outside we saw that he was covered in shiny fiberglass (like the video above). I remembered this post and immediately knew we had to check the mattress. Sure enough there were glittery fibers EVERYWHERE in the bedroom, all over the floor, sheets & laundry, etc.

We are still trying to figure out just how bad the damage is & how much we need to throw away vs. what can maybe be salvaged.

Again, we NEVER removed the cover. And there is no evidence of the cover having been damaged anywhere.

It just was 3-4 years of regular use and then suddenly, one day while changing the sheets, there was glass everywhere. It’s probably been leaking into our laundry, and likely our bodies, for who knows how long.

Lots of people saying these mattresses are safe as long as you don’t remove the cover - it’s NOT true. Maybe it’s fine for a year or two, but at some point the fibers break down and start to come out THROUGH the cover.

I found this huge blog post by a guy who mostly does tech stuff. in it, he talks about his attempts to get several mattress companies to tell the truth about their products, and has compiled his results into a nice table. on the subject of nectar, he recommends avoiding the company entirely. they’re shady as shit

this mile long page is set up as a ranking of The Best Mattresses To Buy In 2021 uwu but it does go in depth about the fiberglass content of each product, and near the bottom it mentioned this interaction with a customer service rep from nectar:

this nectar representative admits to there being fiberglass in the mattress, but don’t worry, it’s the good kind! this author points to nectar specifically for being duplicitous

there was one other interesting thing I found during my search. I’m not going to link it here, and I have no screenshots because I was using an incognito tab (I don’t particularly feel like being peddled nectar mattresses for the next year).

the very first links that come up on google with the prompt “nectar mattress fiberglass” lead to a site called victorianhomesmag. on my first quick scroll through the page, it looked like there was only one mention of fiberglass, which was in the title of the page. “Does Nectar Mattress Have Fiberglass”. that’s a pretty straightforward title, no? but the rest of the page doesn’t answer the question; it just reads like a page that would be titled “Why You Should Buy Our This Mattress”. I did notice that some of the headers for the different sections had odd spaces in them, though. weird, right?

then I used the find in page function to search for the word “fiberglass” and suddenly, when there was only one before, there were five instances of the word! each of them was in those weird empty spaces. I can only assume this is to manipulate search algorithms. again, shady as shit.

one last thing about this page- when I hit the back button, instead of going back to the google results, I got redirected to nectarsleep dot com. there’s a sale going on right now! don’t miss out :3

This is not “oh my gosh, how do our bosses not understand that the culture before was modeled after being in prison, and that it stifled innovation?”

They knew that. That was the entire point. The workplace culture was like that on purpose, and absolutely intended to keep us busy and miserable, because there are more of us than there are of them, and the last time the working population was aware of that, bosses were forced to make major concessions.

Our previous workplace culture made no fucking sense to continue for as long as it did. We’ve known for decades that the 8-hr workday is not effective, that cubicles destroy morale, and that “lean staffing” is bullshit designed to keep the bosses rich while causing massive burnout to everyone else. More recent is the knowledge that they could afford to double their workforce AND sharply increase everyone’s salary and benefits and still make astronomical profit, but that they won’t, solely out of greed.

But our bosses always said, “well okay, maybe that One Study said this was bad… but there’s Just No Other Way, and even if there was, we can’t implement it! Oh no, things just have to stay the same!”

….until the pandemic forced a change.

Rather than completely grind to a halt and make $0, bosses implemented radical, sweeping changes, and they did it FAST.

And their lies have fucking fallen apart.

We can work from home, and we’re just as efficient- if not more so.

Wearing jeans, t-shirts, and even pajamas or no pants at all does not affect the quality of our work.

Since plenty of us are at home, and “stepping away from the desk” more often than managers would typically allow, we now know that actually, yeah- we can get all of our tasks done in 4-5 hours instead of 8.

Not every meeting needs to be in person. Not every meeting even needs to be a meeting- a lot of them can be emails.

…all those lies our bosses told us have been revealed to be ash, falsehoods to preserve the status quo. Their system of power that was broken beyond repair has been un-glamoured. We see it for what it really is.

…which is why our bosses want us to return to it ASAP.

Because we’re aware now that it’s broken, but we haven’t truly started to fight back yet.

We can see that the structure is essentially held together with sticks and spit, but no one’s given it a good kick yet.

They want us back under their thumb before we get a chance to remember what our greatest weapon is and use it against them.

Hint: it’s unions. It’s organization. It’s dignity, and knowing that we deserve it, and collectively deciding that we’re not going to put up with less. Unions, and collective bargaining, and strikes, have the power to completely dismantle the system, and they know it…

They want to returns us to the system that burns us out, because for the first time in decades, we’re not just smoldering coals anymore- we have a spark. And motivation to fan it into flames.

Nurture that spark, y’all. Unionize.

This is art! 😍

And the thing is, when he came back to his studio, he’s not allowed to have crowds there either because of New York’s restrictions.

But without fail, every other joke, you can hear this one, single woman laughing in the background.

That’s his wife.

Covid restrictions don’t apply to his spouse, and everyone else in the studio has a job, and has to work, so she’s become the only person in the room left laughing at his jokes.

She doesn’t laugh every time. You can tell she’s not doing it on cue, because there are some bits she clearly likes better than others. Some bits where she is laughing her ass off, and some where she just chuckles.

But my god, every time she laughs, Colbert’s face lights up like the sun.

Like, even if every other person on earth was dead and gone, if he was on his deathbed and breathing his last breath, he’d still make a jokes, just to make her laugh again.