Cotton and bamboo change the fibre. They don't change the three things people actually name when they describe a reaction: the elastic band, the stitched seam, and the dye and finishing chemistry.

A cotton five-pack still has a waistband with elastic in a casing. It still has four to six stitched seams. Its dye lot is whatever the mill ran that week.

Sothee isn't a different-fibre argument. It's the same garment with the band removed, the seams removed, the edges cut instead of hemmed, and the finishing chemistry screened and documented.

Worth saying plainly: if the fibre itself was genuinely your issue, this won't fix it. Better to know that before you order.

Night one. The missing waistband is what people mention first — there's no line, and nothing to reach down and adjust.

Week one. Usually when they stop getting rotated to the back of the drawer and start being the pair you look for.

Week four and past it. The durability question answers itself. The silver is spun into the yarn rather than coated onto it, so it doesn't rinse out, and the shape holds because the whole knit carries the tension a band used to carry alone.

We deliberately don't publish a skin timeline here. Sothee is a garment, not a treatment. How your skin responds to removing a contact trigger is a conversation for you and your doctor, not a number for us to promise.

Honest answer: because of what the construction costs.

A waistband is the cheapest thing to add to underwear and the most expensive thing to remove. Knitting in the round as one continuous tube with no side seam, then laser-cutting every edge instead of folding and stitching it, runs slower and wastes more cloth. Screening each run for formaldehyde, azo dyes and pH is a cost per lot, not a cost once.

That is also why the pairs are sold in twos, fours and sixes rather than singly — the per-pair price falls the further down that run we go, and we would rather pass that on than charge everyone the single-pair rate.

Set against what is already in your drawer, the maths is less dramatic than it looks. Most people reading this have bought three or four multipacks hunting for one that worked. That search has already been paid for — it just did not buy anything you kept wearing.

And if the band was never your problem, a supermarket multipack is genuinely the better buy. We would rather you spent the money somewhere it does something.

The silver is ionic and spun into the yarn itself rather than sprayed on as a surface finish. That matters twice: a coating is the part that rinses away in the wash, and it's also the part most able to come off onto skin.

Because it sits in the fibre, the antibacterial result was re-tested after 300 wash cycles and was still there. The silver is EPA-registered and approved under the EU Biocidal Products Regulation, and the finished cloth is screened under STANDARD 100 by OEKO-TEX® for direct skin contact.

One thing to be clear about: the antibacterial grade is measured on the fabric. It describes what happens on the cloth. It is not a claim about anything happening inside your body, and we don't make one.

Sixty nights, then one email.

Wear them. Wash them. Sleep in them. If your skin disagrees with them, write to us inside 60 nights and we refund the order. There's nothing to send back — worn underwear isn't something we want returned, and a policy that demands it is really just a policy designed to be annoying enough that you give up.

We picked 60 nights rather than 30 because one laundry cycle tells you almost nothing. You need enough wears to know whether the absence of a band is something you genuinely notice, or just something that reads well on a page like this one.