Here is what you need to know about the man known to hundreds of thousands of people as Kismai: Kismai is not his legal name; he is incapable of eating cheeseburgers without getting some on his shirt; and he hates when people are wrong on the internet. Separately, those three distinct characteristics could describe anyone. Together, those elements make for a hero to the people who seek laundry advice on Reddit.
“You would not know [from looking] at me that I am good at laundry,” Kismai told Vox (his full username is KismaiAesthetics, a joke from the first season of the sitcom Letterkenny.) “You would be more inclined to think I smell like Post Malone. I think that’s part of my charm. I’m not Martha Stewart. I am not stereotypically fastidious. I do this because I am a fat, sweaty slob who eats with wild abandon and apparently never learned to use cutlery as a toddler.”
Kismai is a savant when it comes to getting clothes clean.
He has singlehandedly changed the way people do laundry. He is the reason the word “lipase” has become a topic of conversation across elder millennial group chats. He can move the market. His adherents clamor for their faceless champion to give them advice. They praise him for a 12-hour process called “spa day” and post their disgusting but satisfying results for the world to see. The small monetary tips they’ve sent him in appreciation have paid for his health insurance for the entire year.
Kismai never intended his laundry posts or his alter ego to ever get this popular, but this celebrity makes sense. Millions of us do laundry, and even though we live in the most technologically advanced age of washing machines and have an astonishing amount of detergents at our disposal, our clothes, sheets, and towels all suffer from persistent problems: foul pit funks, color transfers, graying whites, relentless stains, etc.
Spending the time and energy to do laundry and not come away with clean clothes is frustrating. We ruin our favorite shirts, cycle through socks and underwear faster than we’d like, throw away musty gym attire, and ultimately spend more money on both new clothes and new detergents in hopes to break free.
The act of doing laundry is predicated on the idea of washing away past grimes and past mistakes. When someone provides a method to this madness, shows their work and the results, and maps out an end to our collective annoyances, people will listen. Even if that person is a self-described slob.
“It’s this universal human experience, right?” Kismai said, trying to explain his popularity and the nerve he’s struck. “And for me, this all started with: How the fuck do I get the cheeseburger grease out of cotton?”
Why everyone suddenly wants detergent with lipase
One of the crucial tenets of Kismai’s laundry strategy is centered on lipase, a naturally occurring enzyme that can also be industrially prepared. Enzymes are especially good at breaking down different kinds of stains, which makes them an important component of laundry detergent. Lipase’s specialty is tackling lipids and fats (think: cooking oils, butter, and some oily body secretions).
“Some of the most common fat molecules are ‘Y’-shaped molecules called triglycerides,” said Nathan Kilah, a professor at the University of Tasmania who specializes in synthetic chemistry. “The ‘arms’ of the ‘Y’ are fatty acids that are linked into a central glycerol group. The lipase can break the connection between the fatty acids — Y arms — and the glycerol — central bit — which makes them into smaller molecules that can more readily dissolve into water.”
This science isn’t new; the first patent for animal derived enzymes in washing was granted in 1913. Kilah told Vox that different enzymes are quite common in detergents, and they generally help remove specific types of stains. For example, proteases are good for tackling protein stains like blood, while pectinases can target fruit-based stains like juice and wine.
“For me, this all started with: How the fuck do I get the cheeseburger grease out of cotton?”
Kismai
Given the sheer amount of laundry products currently on the market, you’d think that you’d easily be able to find something that works. But there’s a catch if you live in the United States.
Most of the world uses powdered laundry detergent, which allows for more enzyme flexibility; Americans generally prefer liquid, which doesn’t always contain these precious enzymes. Kilah, who lives in Australia, said that the challenge with liquids is making sure all the components work together in the wash while remaining shelf stable. (Put another way, a liquid detergent may not include lipase if it won’t play well with the solution’s other elements.) In powder form, every ingredient can be physically separated as a different granule, which makes it easier to create a shelf-stable, water-activated mix.
“You do find liquid detergents with enzymes added, but I think in general they are more common, and likely more reliable, in powdered products,” Kilah said.
Jennifer Ahoni, a principal fabric care scientist at Procter and Gamble, said that while lipase isn’t necessarily a silver bullet, nor does its presence mean a detergent is automatically a good one, the best detergents generally have a mix of different enzymes, surfactants, and polymers.
“I understand where that trend for looking for an ingredient like lipase is coming from,” Ahoni told Vox. Enzymes can be very good at tackling off-putting phantom smells, which explains why so many people who take Kismai’s recommendations come away feeling like they’ve had their lives changed.
“Consumers are just really looking for a good clean, and greases and body soils are some of the toughest soils that consumers are encountering,” Ahoni added.
But since enzymes are not a staple of American liquid laundry detergents, anyone who wants to make this change would have to do a fair amount of legwork and read a lot of ingredients. That’s where Kismai comes in.
He has a spreadsheet called the “Lipase List,” which contains a catalog of detergents that contain the enzyme. It also goes a step further and identifies if it has any other enzymes, as well as oxygenated bleach, surfactants, and various other elements that his conscientious launderers are looking for. There are also tabs for pre-treaters and laundry boosters that contain useful ingredients.
Once you’ve seen his Reddit posts and then the list, you’ll become hyper-aware of the lipase you’ve been missing out on if you’ve opted for, say, Tide pods over powders. You may even spend your free time trying to track down Miele’s UltraColor Floral Boost, which boasts multiple enzymes that can theoretically tackle a variety of tough stains and odors.
“I’ve always assumed that I write in obscurity on the internet,” he said, but the Lipase List’s expansive reach changed his mind.
One day, Kismai found himself running out of Whole Foods’s 365 Sport Laundry Detergent, one of the rare North American liquid detergents that contains the enzyme DNAse, which tackles soils like sweat, those yellow underarms stains on T-shirts, the brownish tint of old socks, and stinky gym gear.
“Three or four different Whole Foods — it’s out of stock,” he said. “ I go to the customer service desk. I say, What’s going on with this? They said…we’ll get more of it. Then they say some lady came in two hours ago asking about the exact same thing, and she said she heard about it on Reddit.”
That shortage wasn’t a one-off. Redditors frantically post when 365 Sport has gone missing from local shelves or isn’t stocked on Amazon.
Everyone loves to see disgusting photos of grimy water
Kismai’s most famous invention is known as “spa day,”which he posted on Reddit back in August and continuously updates with new information about the best products to use and more thorough directions. It involves finding the largest bucket, cooler, or basin in your house and intensely soaking and agitating your items (generally high-use pieces that have a lot of buildup or enduring stains like heavily worn T-shirts, sheets, towels, etc.) in a solution that contains lipase, oxygen bleach, surfactant-rich detergent, and water, before washing it with a dose of ammonia. The soak takes the better part of a day, at least eight hours. It is also one of the most disgusting things to behold.
Spa day aficionados affectionately call the soaking water “soup.” Those who have tried the process for themselves know that what begins as a mix of water and detergent ultimately becomes something different. It takes on a haunting texture — there’s a thick sliminess, a scrim of glossy oils, a visible filth that resembles melted dirty snow that was collected from a parking lot.
Perhaps even more distressing than what it looks and feels like is the unavoidable knowledge of where the soup came from: you. It’s on the towels you dry your hands and body with, the pillowcases your rest your face on, and the clothes you live in.
This soup is partly you.
“Filthy water is like catnip,” Kismai said. Many humans that have created their own personal soups vouch for its success (including myself and my editor), and judging by the endless scroll of new spa day posts, it seems like every day more and more people attempt to experience its horrors and benefits.
Kismai created “spa day” not because he has a voyeuristic desire to see other people’s dirty water. He was simply tired of seeing people ask about lingering stinkiness on r/laundry.
“It was post and post and post every day,” he said, referring to a common problem of just-washed, seemingly clean clothes becoming stinky after a tumble dry or when worn for a short period of time.
Experts call that phenomena odor rebloom.
Odor rebloom “is a nice way to talk about bringing that funk back,” Ahoni, the P&G scientist, said. It’s one of the fastest-growing complaints that Ahoni and her colleagues deal with.
The primary culprit of odor rebloom is sebum, which she bluntly calls “body grease.” It’s hard to see, and can persist on clothes even through several wash cycles. Clothes might smell clean coming out of the wash, but when sebum and other body oils are warmed up, the pungent sleeper cells reactivate.
Kilah, the chemistry professor at the University of Tasmania, said that the combination of ingredients in the recommended detergents for spa day do a lot of heavy lifting to get clothes back to looking and smelling normal. But what makes it uniquely effective is that you give these various cleaning agents extra time to work on stains, smells, oils, and grime.
“The key to any chemical reaction taking place is time and temperature,” Kilah said. “We can’t increase the temperature too much…but we can use time to get a more complete process.”
What if being better at laundry could save the world (a little bit)
Kismai’s extensive knowledge of laundry chemistry, musty garments, and human soil soup comes from his general curiosity surrounding chemistry and textiles, and from being around laundry his whole life.
“My mom was ridiculously fastidious. I think that’s the nicest way to put it,” he said, explaining that, as an only child, he often helped his mother do chores. She was an analyst at a regional bank, but also was, like many women (at the time and to this day), in charge of the housework. Kismai described himself to me as incorrigibly messy, so one can only imagine the kind of stains — dust, grease, melted popsicle juice, etc. — his mom tackled.
Now, at 52, he is still a sloppy eater. Getting better at laundry, he said, was a more solvable problem to him than consuming food more elegantly. The better he got at doing laundry, the more it extended the life of his garments. The longer his clothes last, he realized, the less clothes he had to buy.
More ethical clothing consumption has become his North Star.
Every piece of clothing we wear has an environmental cost, whether that’s water or electricity or the food given to a flock of Merino sheep or the carbon emitted shipping the garments. “I’m not super crunchy about this, but I want to be aware of it,” Kismai said when describing his views on consumerism. “The shirt I’m [theoretically] going to wear is grown primarily in Egypt. The fabric is dyed and woven in Switzerland. It’s cut and sewn to my order in Malaysia and is delivered to a Nordstrom store — that’s a lot of impact for something to look good in.”
If something as simple as a T-shirt requires all those resources, Kismai wants to make it last. This thinking made him curious about textile care labels and led him to look into what chemicals do to clothes.
Now, in his spare time, he sets alerts for laundry in academic journals, particularly nature ones, because they publish a significant amount of research on the best ways to lessen the environmental toll of laundry.
Sharing information on Reddit about how he’s saving his T-shirt can teach someone else how to do the same, even if they aren’t thinking about their carbon footprint when they log on. “I just want other people to benefit from the knowledge,” he said. “I want stuff to smell good and feel good and look good, and I want to extend the minimal effort and not fuck anything up while doing it.”
There’s a popular laundry philosophy that frames the act of washing clothes as therapy, if not service. It’s a nice idea — that the cleaning of one’s clothes could also rinse away one’s problems. But that’s not Kismai’s belief system. His philosophy is less aspirational, and more gruff: We’re perpetually stinky messes. Cleaning up is the least we could do.
“Yeah, look, no — this is a task to be dealt with, not an expression of your filial piety,” he said.
Unlike some laundry experts and influencers, Kismai doesn’t monetize his solutions. Both the Lipase List and the spa day instructions are free, and Kismai said he does not take any industry money. He does have a Buy Me a Coffee page, allowing grateful readers to send him small tips for his work.
“Since December, I’ve paid my health insurance for the year,” he said.
That generous response helped convince him to pursue being a laundry savant full time. He now has an agent and is working on a proposal for a book about laundry that he’s hoping will come out in late 2027.
The most difficult part of all this success, Kismai told me, is that eventually he may have to actually reveal his true identity: a guy named Eric.
“There are very few people in the world that know that Kismai and Eric are the same person — my friends, my family, my literary agent,” he said. “I have this alter ego who is much nicer, much more giving, much more outgoing. [I’m] trying to keep him and his online activities away from Eric’s.”
Vox agreed not to print Eric’s last name. He said he isn’t ready for the type of fame that Kismai has, nor does he want to devote his life to being his alter ego. “I like that, at the end of the day, I can in fact turn off Kismai’s life for the night, and resume being Eric,” he said.
Still, during our conversation he recalled a moment recently in a Chipotle where he caught a strong whiff of Gain and told his husband — he could pinpoint who it was, and he asserted that the burrito-buying patron wasn’t just washing his clothes with Gain, but was also using at least two more Gain-scented products. It could be that not being Kismai’s is a little difficult at this point — even more difficult than doing laundry.
