Think fresh. Fresh scents. Fresh air. Fresh as a summer’s day. Fresh from the dryer. What!?! The new TV commercial for Bounce shows a family waiting next to the dryer so that they can put on clothes with that “fresh from the dryer” scent.

Back in the twentieth century, when these dryer sheets were invented, the marketers sold us on the idea that they gave machine-dried clothes the fresh scent of being dried on a clothesline. Flowers, sunshine, a soft spring breeze—that was what we city-dwellers were after. Country fresh.

Is this the first generation to associate freshness with machines? That’s quite a marketing trick. Quick. Go outside and smell the sunshine.