“I Know What Clean Smells Like”: These New Bleach Ads Are Terrifying -The Toast

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These new ads for bleach are raw as hell and I’m honestly not ready to live and die in this world. I’m not strong enough. I’m soft and afraid and my bloodline is weak; I know this. Rome has lost its breed of noble bloods, and I’m the most lost out of anybody. Have you seen this? Are you prepared to meet God?

Nora Dunn – who survived SNL’s ’85 season and has nothing left to prove – strides down a grocery store aisle wearing a cardigan made of your ancestors’ bones and says, “Lots of marketing going on in this aisle.” It sounds like a compliment.

And wolf looks like a sheep if he wears a wool coat. Nora Dunn is not here to be your friend.

“Fancy labels, slick designs…this one’s got flowers on it. It’s pretty.” We are all Anne Hathaway smiling like a goddamn rube right before Meryl Streep tells us she picked out our shapeless turquoise sweater for us. Pretty isn’t good, you weaklings. Nora Dunn has seen some shit, and she’s here to save our live, not spare our feelings.

“When the stomach flu ravages my home, am I supposed to believe that an Ocean Breeze is going to wash it away?” You credulous, soft-titted children. You will not last the autumn; you lack even the vigor necessary to die in winter. What have you been cleaning your home with? Gossamer and optimism? You white-necked naif. You do not even deserve to have hands to clean with. Nora Dunn’s home has been ravaged by stomach flu. Ravaged. Black, poisonous, drippy stuff shooting out both ends. It got everywhere. Everywhere. And where were you, Ocean Breeze? Fucking nowhere to be found is where. She used BLEACH.

“I know what clean smells like,” Nora Dunn says. “Bleach.” Clean smells like bleach; bleach is what clean is. If A, then B. A always, therefore B always. A and B are indistinguishable. If you have clean, you have bleach. If you have no bleach, nothing is clean. Do you see now? She’s seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like drops of dog piss in a bleach puddle.

“The same bleach that knocks down dysentery.” WAIT, WHAT? NORA DUNN, IS IT 1700 WHERE YOU ARE? ARE YOU LIVING ON A SHIP IN HIS MAJESTY’S NAVY? ALSO YOU ARE KIND OF MAKING IT SOUND LIKE BLEACH CURES DYSENTERY WHICH IS NOT EXACTLY TRUE? BLEACH IS LIKE A BLOWTORCH INASMUCH AS IT WILL GET RID OF DYSENTERY FOR SURE BUT IT’LL ALSO BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN OUT IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY SPILL IT.

“And cleans up crime scenes.” WAIT

WAIT

“AND CLEANS UP CRIME SCENES” NORA DUNN ARE YOU ADVERTISING THE BENEFITS OF BLEACH TO SERIAL KILLERS

WHY WOULD YOU EVEN BRING THAT UP

MOST OF US ARE JUST LOOKING FOR SOME HOUSEHOLD DISINFECTANT NOT “WHAT CLEANS A BUCKET CONTAINING LITERALLY EVERY BODILY FLUID”

“If you want to spend three bucks on liquid doubt, be my guest.” Why is this commercial about ontology all of a sudden?? Nora Dunn, this commercial is for cleaning solvents and it’s 31 seconds long and you’re making me question my entire life!

“But if you want clean, get a cleaner with bleach in it.” JESUS. OKAY. I WILL BUY LITERALLY ANYTHING YOU TELL ME TO, THIS IS THE ONLY WOMAN WHO COULD HAVE MARRIED CURLY FROM CITY SLICKERS.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only bleach will remain.

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I am so excited for this commercial series to continue. Also I found this:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index...

"I'm interested in collecting skulls, skeletons, etc. from various species. What would be the easiest and quickest way to remove flesh from carcasses that I come across?"

Bleach.
18 replies · active 464 weeks ago
She bathes in bleach. Makeup = bleach. Everything is bleach now.
1 reply · active 465 weeks ago
"CLEANS UP CRIME SCENES"

*adds to serial killer handbook*
4 replies · active 465 weeks ago
Fuck. Yes. This is the world I was born to rule. Bring it.
I cannot clean with bleach! Years and years of scrubbing bird cages with soapy, bleachy water and getting said water in my face as I chiseled away at mountains of bird poo and then the smell that would linger in my hands for five days... only subsiding when it was once again my turn to clean the bird cages with bleach and the cycle started all over again...

So now when people recommend bleach as a cleaner I go "hmm, but windex is the same thing, right?" and it's not but windex doesn't give me bird flashbacks.
9 replies · active 465 weeks ago
Bleach dissolves everything but fat if you let it sit long enough.
5 replies · active 461 weeks ago
My MIL wholeheartedly believes that it's not clean unless it smells like bleach (or in the case of clothes, you must smell the dryer sheet even after you've washed it three more times). I can't tell you how satisfying it is to see this idea skewered!!
6 replies · active 464 weeks ago
Is Nora Dunn...my Dad? He uses so much bleach on everything that there's no more enamel on the bottom of the tub (only agreeably rough cast iron, like a built-in loofah) and we all have little white spots on our clothes where it caught us by surprise. He can't stand scented cleansers, either (and passed that along to us.) He tried to bleach the side of the house and only stopped when my Mom pointed out how much it would cost to get that much bleach.

And yet it's still not as bad for coral reefs as sunscreen!
2 replies · active 465 weeks ago
Let's have more commercials like this, I say! I'm done with mothers rolling their eyes while smiling as their toddler and dog splash spaghetti sauce all over the kitchen. Fuck that! Who do those broads think they're fooling? Life is a horrid hellscape and we need products that are meant to wipe out ALL life, not just make it smell better.
4 replies · active 465 weeks ago
Bleach smells like childhood to me. Thanks to years on the swim team, I should add, not because my family is a roving band of serial killers.
22 replies · active 464 weeks ago
If I learned *anything* from Jolie Kerr, it is that bleach is not effective on bodily fluids.
At least if they're giving advice to serial killers it is bad and unhelpful advice.
Them, and every forensics show known to teeveeland.
17 replies · active 463 weeks ago
She dissolved my ancestors in a tub of bleach in order to make that jacket, didn't she
My boyfriend likes to tease me when I buy environmentally friendly cleaning products because he thinks they are useless. Unsurprisingly, he found this commercial delightful when it appeared on our television a few weeks ago.
3 replies · active 461 weeks ago
I LOVE this commercial so much. I think I identify with it because for the past three years, I have had to share a bathroom with a grubby PhD candidate who has never once picked up a damned sponge, so I bleach the life out of that bathroom. I'm moving out in three weeks and I cannot WAIT.
Don't clean your dog piss puddle with bleach though, unless you like the smell of chlorine gas (you won't).
7 replies · active 463 weeks ago
all commercials are about ontology though tbh
1 reply · active 465 weeks ago
I like how Clorox's marketing strategy is to make fun of the entire idea of marketing
My grandparents sometimes bleach their teapot and all their teacups. Sometimes I'm concerned about drinking tea at their house.
7 replies · active 464 weeks ago
I found out when I moved into a house with a pool that bleach is the easiest, cheapest way to keep my pool chlorinated all summer (and the best way to REALLY clean it after sitting closed all winter in Ohio). I am sure the people at the discount store where I buy bleach by the dozen probably do think I'm a serial killer.
2 replies · active 465 weeks ago
I swim 3-5 times a week. Therefore I pretty much always smell like bleach. ...therefore I am always clean?
2 replies · active 465 weeks ago
Martha Stewart says the smell of clean is actually the smell of nothing, so I heartily disagree with Big Bleach.
2 replies · active 465 weeks ago
“If you want to spend three bucks on liquid doubt, be my guest.”

I thought she said "liquid dowd," like the noun for "dowdy."

Go ahead and tell me my lavender scented dowd isn't cleaning my floor well enough, go ahead, and I will tell you how evolution by natural selection works..
1 reply · active 465 weeks ago
BRB, picturing Nora Dunn in literally every 80's sci-fi epic from my formative years now.
So what you're saying is the spice melange was bleach!?
Oh man, Mallory, please keep yelling at commercials for us forever (or, y'know until you lose interest).
noYOUare's avatar

noYOUare · 465 weeks ago

Thanks, Nora Dunn. I'll buy bleach the very next time I'm concerned about dysentery.
2 replies · active 464 weeks ago
A few weeks ago, some ANT COLONY found it's way to my apartment, and there would be lines of them crawling up my computer charger wire and to my coffee table and just existing. I would stomp them and wipe them away, but then more would come the next day. I panicked and didn't know what to do, and so shook out bleach all over my living room.

They did not come back.
8 replies · active 464 weeks ago
Bleach would be really useful for cleaning up the crime scene after murdering "Jack" and "Steve" from that horrible Dear Prudence question from last week where the writer's friend told her that she should have considered being raped as "taking one for the team".

Set that "friendship" on fire, and then clean up the evidence with bleach! Wonderful bleach!
10 replies · active 465 weeks ago
Somewhere this woman has met my Dad who has been convinced that cleaning means one is to leave puddles of bleach - and Pine-Sol - on bathroom surfaces. Clearly, it's not clean unless you lose the ability to smell anything else.
S. Pebbletush's avatar

S. Pebbletush · 465 weeks ago

This is a good time to mention that I once wrote a cute song about how much I love bleach and emailed to to Jolie Kerr, right? (And she wrote back to express that she was DELIGHTED by it!)

I also have a song for Scrubbing Bubbles.
1 reply · active 465 weeks ago
She fails to mention the best thing about bleach. It makes cat crazy. It's hilarious.

ALSO YOU ARE KIND OF MAKING IT SOUND LIKE BLEACH CURES DYSENTERY WHICH IS NOT EXACTLY TRUE?

Do you really think so? Then you know nothing, Mallory Snow.
1 reply · active 465 weeks ago
Elizabeth A's avatar

Elizabeth A · 465 weeks ago

This commercial quite clearly sums up my feelings about stomach flu, which swept through my children's elementary school at Halloween last year, to the extent that the state health department was called in and the CDC was put on notice.

I just don't think I had any cardigans that clean after the whole experience.
2 replies · active 465 weeks ago
Dearest Toast, I see your terrifying bleach ads and accompanying primal dread, and raise you my Olde Tymey Vintage Hygiene Ads Pinterest board. When men were men, and women Lysol'd - let's not dwell.
https://uk.pinterest.com/estherfischlein/olde-tym...
1 reply · active 465 weeks ago
I just came here to say that i love the smell of bleach.
Oh god no, I hate bleach. I hate it's tangy odor that lingers for daaaaaaaays, stealing my hope and my dreams. My mom used to clean the kitchen with bleach and I'd rather starve than go into that chemical fog. I don't trust anything that's been bleached. It's useless to me, covered in poison. I'd rather have dysentery. I'D RATHER BE CAUGHT FOR MY CRIMES. I'D RATHER ROT IN A CESSPOOL OF HUMAN FILTH.

I am really comfortable with dirt.
2 replies · active 463 weeks ago
There are an AWFUL LOT OF PEOPLE in this thread avowing they are not serial killers, is all I'm saying
Wait! What? Blade Runner and the Bene Gesserit in one post! You have absolutely made my day. I swear I once knew that litany by heart. Sad but true. :-)
a city slickers reference? bless your heart. Curly is my standard for the type of man i want and deserve and every other man has been found to be a ball-capped billy crystal shaped space of lacking. i fear i will die alone with my cats and no calves named norman in sight.
Chlorine is the devil. Most of what I have to seriously disinfect is stainless or surgical steel, and expensive. If I caught someone cleaning my instruments with bleach I would smack them, seriously.
I like the phenolics, myself (Lysol Concentrate is the most commonly-available), and quarternary amines rock pretty hard when they're combined with high concentrations of alcohol. Bonus---neither of these will ruin your clothes (although the quats will turn your palms orange if you use latex gloves and don't change them really often).
Fucking nowhere Nora Dunn has to be found. She used BLEACH I like your videos
1 reply · active 432 weeks ago

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