Oh, Dettol, you really did this one dirty.

Dettol has upset the Chinese internet today over a bizarre ad campaign featuring a man looking for a woman who is "clean" enough to marry. At one point, he says: "It’s okay if I’m not her first, but not when it comes to my future wife. Luckily, I found someone who’s still clean and hasn’t been contaminated by other men."

Dettol has now apologized, saying the video was created by a "third-party influencer" and was actually intended to critique gender bias.

The problem is that the entire ad, however, plays out like a cheap mini-drama that repeatedly frames women’s sexual relationship history in terms of being "clean" vs "dirty," with Dettol positioned as the ultimate solution at the end. Even if the intention was to portray the male character as being in the wrong, the message was conveyed so poorly that it backfired spectacularly.

And it gets stranger: the woman who is about to marry this man doesn’t actually break up with him because of his views. She breaks up with him because he throws his dirty socks in with her laundry after promising he wouldn’t.

(In this context, washing women’s underwear together with men’s dirty socks is seen as "contaminating" the woman’s clothes.)

Only clips of the ad are going viral online, but I dug up the now-deleted full ad and quickly added subtitles (apologies for any mistakes), so you can judge for yourself.

Quite a mess for a brand whose entire business revolves around "cleanliness."