⬜ This sponge gave me lifestyle creep

Plus, how to size Etsy vintage.

Kyle Chayka: Living in someone else’s space is a great way to role-play a different life. When I spent a week house-sitting for friends in Brooklyn — aka inhabiting their empty apartment while they were on vacation — I first noticed how organized they were. A spot for everything! Could I be such a person, efficient, elegant, effective? Then I saw the sponge on their kitchen sink. Gently neon-colored, a perfect rectangular prism, with a material more like something from a chemistry lab than the Swiss-cheese Scotch-Brite I was used to — it was a revelation. An experience in itself.  

When I got back home I googled “fancy scrubbing sponge,” and it delivered me to the correct brand, Skura. I promptly ordered a package of four Skrubby Sponges ($15 on Amazon, $3.75 per sponge) and have since bought them slightly cheaper in bulk, stacking bricks of sponges under the sink. Never has $3.75 made my life so much better. The finely grained, sandpaper-ish surface scours pots with ease. The gray foam absorbs but also expels water, drying out quickly. It doesn’t get smelly. Have I mentioned I just turned 35? Such are my joys.

You can also use them for modular constructivist sculptures

Skura was founded in 2017 by two childhood friends, Linda Sawyer and Alison Matz, who had careers in advertising and media. (One Thing stans a career pivot from media to hard goods.) Eva Mendes apparently joined on for celebrity power. The brand is what the direct-to-consumer start-up wave was supposed to be: an improved product that both looks and works better than the old stalwarts, available online. A Skrubby sponge lasts for a few weeks to a month, depending on your extremity of cooking; the company says to watch out for when the monogram logo fades, but that’s just planned obsolescence. 

The sponge makes me dream of such perfection for the rest of our kitchen. “Lifestyle creep” is a term for when one luxury or improvement makes the rest of your lifestyle look shabby. You get a Chanel bag or Loro Piana baseball cap and suddenly your entire wardrobe needs an upgrade. On one hand, lifestyle creep is a motivation toward aesthetic improvement, cultivated taste, and perhaps sustainability. Should I replace the horrible black laminate countertops in our rental so I have something nicer to scrub? Or maybe I just need a whole new apartment?? On the other, it’s an incitement to spend more money on the treadmill of capitalism. The determining factor, especially for a sponge, should be if the product at hand actually improves your routine. I tend to think, if you can look at something every day and not find a reason to hate it, it’s absolutely a worthwhile object. In more ways than one, Skura passes the disgust test.

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From Our Readers:

In response to our newsletter “The Anti-SEO of vintage Etsy,” writer and radio host Alexis Madrigal emailed:

“I love the idea of this. But what do you do if you are a 2023-sized American and you see something from the 1970s labeled a Medium and it arrives and wouldn't fit your 10-year-old?”

Nate Gallant: Thanks to everyone who responded to my Etsy piece. There was a noticeable theme among the messages we received, specifically about how to navigate the aforementioned chaotic mountains of data in order to arrive at a successful vintage purchase. As Alexis points out, this is particularly difficult when it comes to sizing. For masc clothing, an item's size will sometimes be described with little more than something to the effect of “men's M.” This is nearly meaningless given the difficulty of ascertaining any sort of provenance or authenticity for clothing on Etsy, and this doesn't even get us into the circus that is sizing for femme clothing, past and present. What's more, most of the stores I encounter on Etsy have no clear return policy, and those that do tend to be rather onerous and/or costly.

My recommendation for buying in the same as my recommendation for searching. Seeking out reliable, professional, and well-rated stores is the only way to find consistency on the site and minimize the risk of a bad purchase. Look for stores that offer measurements for each part of the item of clothing and are well-rated for accuracy, quality, and delivery. Delivery is key. Sometimes you’ll get shipped a completely different product than what you ordered, and in those cases it’s possible to request a refund via Etsy. If the sizing is off, refunds depend on the store’s policy. And if you get nothing at all or you’re told that the item was lost in transit, you’ll likely not get a refund or be told to take it up with La Poste, which I would not recommend. (Here’s an example of a good spread of information on a listing.)

Ultimately, there is no avoiding the element of surprise. Two years ago I ordered a black corduroy coat, mostly due to its obscenely low price. Based on the photos and sizing it seemed to be an everyday, chore coat sort of deal. But what arrived was an oversized, velvet-lined winter-weight jacket, curiously cut like a blazer. Luckily we live in the era of casual, poofing drapery in outerwear. It could have ended up a bad surprise, but, for what it's worth, it has since become both my favorite coat and by far the thing I've gotten the most compliments on — and I didn't even really pick it out. Such is Etsy. Good luck out there, please share any finds or successful purchases!

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