Dirty clothes or smelly laundry detergent? Which is worse?

At home, we ran out of laundry liquid. Our whole house had been sick for like two weeks, so I had not brought home more laundry and cleaning supplies from my store lately. I had a small bottle of Tide left over from a recent science experiment with the kids, so in a pinch I just used that.

Question: when did Tide get so....smelly?! Ugh - when I walk downstairs, the first thing I smell is whatever perfume they're putting in that bottle of Tide. When I hug my children, the first thing I smell is the Tide on their clothes. It's cloying. It's annoying. And it might not be so bad if it was a good smell. But it's not.

This is not the first time I've ever used Tide. I don't remember it smelling so bad. It's not that I hate all perfume smells; it's more that I know the ingredients are kept secret and can often be harmful, so I choose not to use perfumed products. I seem to remember Tide having a more pleasant scent. The kids are actually complaining about the smell.

And it creeps me out a bit that the scent lingers for so long. How does laundry detergent manage to stink up an entire room? And I sure don't want to smell it every time I hug my children. Maybe I'm just oversensitive to it since I've been using unscented products for so long. (One more thing: why is it blue? There's no reason for it to be blue. And what do they put in it to make it blue?)

You know what? I think I'll just let the clothes be dirty for a while until I get back to my maker space and brew up a batch of my own laundry soap.