“Wool allergies aren’t real”
I fucking hate it when fiber people insist that “wool allergies don’t exist!”
Their posts tend to go “You only think you’re allergic to wool because you’ve only encountered low-quality wool. But MY wool is the best wool ever, not scratchy at all, and if you just touched it, you’d realize that your wool allergy is fake. In fact, claiming to be allergic to it harms people with actual life-threatening allergies because it makes people not take allergy claims seriously!”
Like, do you listen to yourself? You do realize that you’re the one not taking allergies seriously, right? Do you have any medical training that would allow you to test someone’s allergies? More fundamentally, do you actually think that invalidating people’s experiences is going to suddenly make them want to buy your product? If someone doesn’t like wool, regardless of whether they’re ”actually” allergic or not, scolding them is not going to make them suddenly fall in love with wool and spend tons of money on your yarn.
Because that’s always what this shit comes down to. Somebody’s offended that people don’t want to buy wool from them, so they try to act all morally superior and shame people, despite the whole thing being so transparently profit-motivated.
And look, I almost always knit with wool or wool-blends, and non-superwash wool to boot. But when influencers or companies pull that shtick, I cannot hit the unsubscribe button fast enough. It’s infuriating. But what pisses me off the most is when they eventually back down to “Well, sure, some people are allergic to wool, but most aren’t so no one should say that they are!” No, you fucking said that wool allergies don’t exist, and also this new stance doesn’t make you any less of a dick!