The One Thing You Should Always Pack (Besides Underwear)

Packing for travel requires patiently identifying and organizing the mundane necessities of your occasionally itinerant life. It requires you to gather your humdrum accoutrements and anticipate unforeseen miscalculations. It can be overwhelming, sometimes. It is a total pain in the ass, always.

As you go about making miniature piles of crap around your suitcase, there is one thing that I urge you to include no matter what kind of trip you’re taking: a travel-sized bottle of Downy Wrinkle Releaser Plus Odor Eliminator.

(I warned you that the were veering into banal territory. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth knowing.)

I’ve long proselytized to anyone who’d listen about the game-changing potential of packing a small bottle of Febreeze. It allows you to pull double or triple duty on your clothes so you can pack less (and if you pack less, you win—unless you’re driving to Coachella, in which case just empty your entire closet into your trunk).

But someone at Downy realized that they could make life a little easier; recently(ish?) they upped the odor elimination factor for their standard Wrinkle Releaser (if you hate ironing, a bottle of this stuff is worth having around the house because it actually works). But combine it with serious stink control in a three-ounce bottle, and my sad little toiletries bag is so much happier. One tiny bottle of Downy Wrinkle Releaser Plus is all you need for everything. Ever. And I really want to emphasize the “plus” here because, unlike the original Wrinkle Releaser formula, the B.O.-elimination capabilities of Plus are on par with Febreeze.

What’s that, you say? Febreeze is more than enough for your travel bag? Cool, but the Wrinkle Releaser Plus is just as good as Febreeze. (Sorry, Febreeze—you’ll always be my number one girl for freshening up at home, but I gotta leave you there.) Oh, you don’t want to use this Downy shit because you don’t care about wrinkles when you travel? Good for you, but someday you might. Be prepared for that day.

Sometimes the Plus stuff is rare on shelves, so if you see some in the drugstore travel aisle, be aggressive. (Alternately you can save money, buy a big bottle and pour it into travel-sized spray bottles. Whatever you need to do.) Bulk up. I am not kidding. Buy every bottle you see. Be the wild-eyed woman at Walgreens. Let them judge you. They are fools.

Image via Simple Beautiful Life.