Quest for new socks

Hand-made re-soleable socks,
without anti-bacterial agents
(not my legs. or my socks.)
credit: krysaia

It's that time again. I've had to throw away a bunch of socks with holes in them. Part of me wonders what happened to darning, which seems something of a lost art. But back to the main topic...

New socks are hard to find in the shops. I'm talking about plain, ordinary socks.

If you've bought any in the past year or so, you may not have noticed that they weren't as plain as you thought. Yes, even the humble sock now comes with anti-bacterial agents and "freshness technology". And it's almost impossible to buy men's socks in the UK without it.

Now, no-one likes smelly feet (well, apart from one of our cats, who seems to be developing a strange fetish for socks that have been through a hard yoga session). But there is becoming no choice whether to have socks with chemically-treated fabrics or not.

Plain, ordinary cotton socks (bless 'em) are a rare species.

The packs don't say what the chemicals are. I might feel better if the manufacturers came clean on the label. And I'm sure this would be welcomed by people with skin allergies.

It seems to me that we've survived for a long time without anti-bacterial socks, even when socks had a longer lifespan (through darning). Do we really need them now?

Photo credit: "Sharks socks redux" by krysaia, licenced under CC-BY-SA licence, via http://www.flickr.com/photos/krysaia/7008399231