Knitting Advice Nr. 16: Don’t buy yarn at Temu (it’s a scam)

I am being inundated with adverts for Temu. I watched a few youtube videos of Temu yarn hauls. I know that China has its own wool production and that some of the wool comes from the fleece of breeds specific to China, such as the fine-wool Gansu breed. .I also know that there is a Chinese sheep breed called Chinese Merino, as well as another one, created in 2016 that is called the Alpine Merino sheep. So plenty of reasons to wonder if I might find some interesting (and cheap) wool on Temu.
China is the the world’s number one wool exporter and where almost all the wool processing is done. As wool is not perishable, in theory, buying directly from China and waiting for 6-8 weeks for the goods to arrive could make economical sense. You would be bypassing all the intermediaries + Temu is offering free shipping (at least on your first order). But I browsed their site for a long long time and the answer is : no, there is no cheap wool available on Temu.
(December 24 update : .it’s still a scam).

I don’t speak Chinese so I first tried a search in my native language (French), to no avail. I switched to English: same result. They kept showing the same items that were not related to my requests. None were actual sheep’s wool, only synthetic fibers that looked a lot like wool What about yak wool, I thought (here again, we’re very near the actual production zones)? Well, I almost fell for it. The price was low for yak wool, but not dirt cheap low. I started reading the reviews and amidst a sea of positive ones, I found one of an unhappy customer, complaining that this “yak wool” was in fact not at all yak wool but 100% acrylic! My guess is that this was an actual review from an actual customer amidst a sea of dodgy, ill-informed or even fake ones.

What about the Temu hauls? First and foremost, none of them were independent reviews of the products. All the youtubers explained that they were not paid by Temu to do their Temu haul video, that they had paid for the products that they were reviewing, that they free to speak out their minds about the qualities of the yarn they had purchased. But all also made it known that they would be getting a percentage of sales made through their embedded links.. I didn’t come across any youtuber that had tried to by sheep, cashmere or yak yarn on Temu (maybe they hadn’t found any in their search?). Interestingly, they did criticise some of their purchases. The critics fell into 2 categories : 1) the abysmal quality of some of the yarn (which meant that they considered they had paid too much for it),2) and/or a mismatch between the description or the label of the yarn and the actual fibre. This was especially the case for milk cotton yarn where the youtubers reported receiving cotton or synthetic fibers instead of the advertised milk cotton.

Don’t buy yarn at Temu: it’s a scam. If you get lucky, you will receive some not too bad synthetic fibre yarn, maybe somewhat cheaper than at your local yarn store or elsewhere online. In the best case scenario, you get the number of skeins you ordered and are all of the same dye batch. The odds are however against you. It is far more likely you will get a yarn that you don’t enjoy knitting with at all or that is unsuitable for your project. Or a mix of these different scenarios. End conclusion: your global purchase ends up being costly. Not only is yarn on Temu a scam, it’s also an expensive way of buying lower-priced yarn.

December 2024 update

December 2024 update : the situation is basically the same as when I first looked into it. What has improved is that you can know enter keywords in French for knitted-related items and its AI is able to sort it out. What has also improved is that Temu is no longer showing me unrelated items when I search their website for yarn. What hasn’t changed is that there isn’t any bargain to make and that their item descriptions are at best vague and far too often deceptive.
What I have noticed is that they are still not indicating a gauge, a weight yarn or even a knitting needle number. Inconvenient. Reading the ratings, it also seems quite a few customers don’t understand how much yarn they will be getting for which price. The short answer is that when Temu is talking about 400g, you are getting 400g in total (for instance 8 skeins 50g each). Now, the main issue remains the fibre content not matching its description on Temu.

Searching for wool

I found some wools that, as far as I know, could have a description that matches their content, even if the name is misleading. I found a wool that is called Merino 200 from a supplier calling itself “First Knitting Shop” and that Merino 200 is, according to them, 75 % Merino and 25 % acrylic. And still according to them, this yarn is a good choice to knit whatever : socks, blankets, scarves, hats, sweaters. Misleading name, typical blend for a sock wool. Another wool, well, was called “Wool Thread” and advertised as being both “Australian Wool Yarn” and “100% wool with anti-pilling fiber”, reading its properties, we are being told it is 70 % Australian Wool and 30 % Anti Pilling Fiber”. Now what on earth is “anti pilling fiber” ot “Australian wool”? Yes, Australian mostly raises Merino sheep, but not all australian sheep are Merino sheep. Some are other breeds raised mostly for their meat (aka their fleece doesn’t produce high quality wool). And the “anti pilling fiber”? My guess is that it is polyester. Poleyster is not a popular term because polyester is hard to wash and you get all sweaty and smelly in polyester and the smell doesn’t go away. even after washing. But there is a huge trend towards fast fashion sweaters being made 100% out of polyester. And polyester is cheap, dirt cheap. And when you are selling yarn at a dirt cheap price, there is a good chance that your 30% “anti pilling fibre” is 100% polyester. The merchants selling on Temu are drop shippers and I found this “Wool Thread” suggested to me multiple times and by different providers. But do Merino 200 and Wool Thread actually contain Merino wool or some unspecified sheep breed wool? Who knows ? Maybe it matches, maybe it doesn’t. The easiest way to find out would be to compare it to some sock wool in your stash and burning (with caution) a little piece of thread as if the fibre content is as specified, it should be burning very much in the same way.

Another “wool” I found was even more mysterious. Simply called Merino Wool, the seller themselves where hesitant on the category this yarn belongs too ; the description depicted the 6 “bundles” with contradictory statements: it was “Slave Wool Yarn” (not very enticing…), but also “Imitation Wool Bundles”, “Warm Wool Yarn”, and last but not least “High Quality Wool Yarn”. This item happened to be the “#6 Best Seller in Yarn” and yet I still wasn’t under the impression that I was having a shopping like a billionaire experience. Ratings however, said it was soft and had a good stitch definition.
According to Temu, 129 people from Switzerland had bought this wool and the comments I get first are those from Switzerland as this is where I live. And most of them had one thing in common : they had rated the yarn without knitting it and they mentioned that they hadn’t knitted it in all our national languages. Now my habit is to click on “see all” , select the filter “rating filters” and go for the reviews with the least stars. And one thing was very clear : those leaving this one star reviews were people who had attempted to knit with Merino Wool.
And shis is what they had to say on their knitting experience with that wool on December 20, 2024: “the material causes allergies”; “every single ball had at least 3-4 knots!! I am really frustrated and after hours of crochet I will give it up…” ; “The Yarn is very scratchy, the thickness is not constant, and I came across the first knot after about 3 stitches. I really mean that they was a knot tied by hand” etc. etc. and….the final blow : Merino Wool is not wool at all! And this we can be sure of as a Dutch lady put it to the test and left the following review on October 29, 2024: “I just performed a dye test on this product and it is most likely 100% polyester. The yarn didn’t take the dye at all and that is deeply troubling for a yarn that is supposed to be a blend with 90 % merino wool.” Very troubling indeed!

Last year, I had starting my search for wool on Temu with the romantic notion that I might find some nice wool spun from fleece of native Chinese breeds such as the Gansu breed or the Alpine Merino. And I looked into it again and again I didn’t find any. Looking for “Gansu wool”, Temu just showed me the same results as with my request for “100% wool yarn” and when I typed “Alpine Merino wool”, it just showed me garments for winter. I don’t speak Chinese and a Chinese speaker might get better search results; it might also be that fine Chinese handknitting manufactorers don’t sell on Temu or that this wool is directly used to create high-end garments.

Why trust the bad reviews ?

Now at this stage you might wonder why I put my trust in the 3% unsatisfied customers rather than the 97% happy ones? First, we all know that knitting and buying yarn are two different hobbies. Yes, these two hobbies are highly correlated and there is some truth that “it’s not hoarding if it’s yarn”, but I dare you to look at your stash and give me a rough estimation of how long you could knit without buying any new yarn. Consequence : many of the “reviews” are from people who haven’t even knitted a small swatch with their Temu purchase. So you get loads of peope just saying “it feels soft” , “super nice colour”, etc. And many., just like the Swiss buyers of Merino Wool I mentioned above, actually state in their ratings that they haven’t knitted anything with it yet.
Secondly, poleyster is poleyster and from an environmental perspective (it’s just more plastic) or wearer perspective (plastic is cold when wet and you sweat in plastic), it doesn’t change anything how well said polyester imitates wool. But, and that’s a key point, manufacturers now create poleyster yarn that looks and feels incredibly close to actual wool. I recently went shopping with my son and as he was queuing for ages to get into the changing cabins and then to pay his purchase, I had plenty of time to go and have a closer look at their sweaters. And… apart from the price, I couldn’t tell the difference between the woollen ones and the 100% poleyster ones. And yes there was a price difference between the two, but much smaller than I would have expected. Now add in the factor that many people with low income mostly knit with acrylic or wools that area blend of wool and synthetic fibres such as poleyster and acrylic, we can assume that a rather large share of people buying yarn on Temu are an easy prey for synthetic fibres parading as wool.
Fourthly, as I wrote in 2023, not all the reviews are independant : influencers get a sale percentage from people buying wool through their embedded links. If I was in their position, the first thing I would do is write a positive review on the yarn I hope to influence people into buying. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn’t it?
Thirdly, basic scientific experimentation is a great way of finding out if a “100% wool” skein is what it proclaims to be. Testing a yarn by burning a little thread to find out what you are dealing with is recommended in many knitting books. It is also a well-known fact that different fibres take dyes differently. That’s why if I come across a review from someone who says they have tested the yarn by dyeing it, I will weigh their opinion a thousand time more than all the people who wrote “looks really nice, feels soft”.

Temu knitting hauls are unfortunately still very much a thing in 2024. Many such hauls are done on rather small channels, bigger ones probably unwilling to compromise their own brand by Temu’s dodgy practices. These channels often profess to be able to help you find “the real bargains” on Temu. Conpiscuously absent from these advices is them carrying out these same basic tests to find out whether the “wool” is actually “wool” or not. And that’s one more reason why I trust the bad reviews infinetely more than all these knitting influencers, however well-meaning or misguided they might be.
Whereas the previous Temu hauls all pretended to be entirely “independant” despite the affiliated links, we can expect some of them to be directly paid by Temu. Recently, I came across a video from Clo Knits in which she discloses that she has been approached by Temu to promote their products and that they were willing to pay her well to do so. She declined the offer and made a video on why she thinks Temu hauls need to stop.
As a side note : I really like Clo Knits’ channel (full of great tutorials, I highly recommend her to you) . I follow her in English. Clo Knits is Canadian and she also has a knitting channel in French. That channel, she told us, has a larger audience than the one in English and it’s for this larger channel that she was approached by Temu.

Health concerns

Contrary to what some knitting influencers would want you to believe, Temu is a jungle. Cutting the middleman is not – per se- necessarily a great idea. And time and time again, it has proven to be plainly dangerous on Temu. (And we’re not even dealing directly with Chinese yarn manufacturers, we’re dealing with dropshippers!).

One thing that strikes me is how unregulated the Chinese direct exports seem to be. There is no democracy in China and the situation keeps worsening. The Chinese state controls its citizen to the point of having developped social credit systems ; in short, it’s a nightmarish surveillance State. But when it comes to exporting out of China, the regime currently acts as if it doesn’t care one bit. More accurately, the regime currently acts as if it doesn’t care one bit about the health and safety of foreign customers;: through Temu, it is following a strategy of flooding outside markets with dirt cheap goods, aiming to achieve market dominance by driving its Western and Asian competitors into bankrupcy.

China is a huge actor in the wool industry. This is where most wool get’s scoured, dyed, spun, and where merino gets its superwash treatment. So when you are buying your usual superwash merino or indeed any yarn from most large wool companies (even Icelandic lopi wool!), you are buying wool that has been processed by Chinese manufacturers. You might want to avoid buying any such wool on moral or political grounds, but as far as health and safety are concerned, this needn’t upset you. Chinese manufacturors have the tools, the knowledge, the experience etc. to produce safe wool that complies with US and European regulations ; fact is, they already do so on a very large scale. Western based websites , Western or Japanese companies act as our middlemen. Not all is perfect – superwash merino in particular comes with a huge environmental cost – but all is safe for the customer. Not so on Temu.

Temu is a jungle. Not only do they copy Western companies, but they have the nerve of advertising it as if they were the actually selling the same product. I’m broke and I sometimes buy stuff from Temu. One of my last purchase are knit blockers. They seem ok but as I was about to review this item on Temu, I noticed that they were advertising them as being a KnitPro product. It isn’t. I told them so. They don’t care: more than an week later, the deceitful indication is still online. This is very unfortunate for KnitPro’s business. However, it is the health concerns that worry me the most. When we knit or crochet, we are in contact for hours on end with our tools. We are also often in direct contact with the yarn. And when reading the abysmal reviews on some yarn on Temus, I unearthed story after story of possible health and safety concerns.

Like a person from Croatia who bought a so-called “100% Merino wool” in November, a yarn that they find hard to knit with and “very sharp”. A person who bought a Jiuweidiaowang Alpaca Wool Yarn Bundle whose composition is allegedly 95 % alpaca and 5 % polyester complains that the wool is “shinng like the cheapest acrylic” , others agree ; amongst them someone says they “don’t like the sensation of it at all2 as “it feels very itchy”, another stating “you constantly come across large, thick pieces of polyester, like a thinly cut cellophane bag” (oh dear !). A person having bought 500g Pure Wool Skeins – Charme Elves, left a one star review in August 2024 that showed a picture of her hand dyed in black, stating that she had just started to use the wool and that the colour came from the wool. Other unhappy customers who bought a wool whose label was “Focus on quality – Baby Cashmere” : one Italian lady said in December 2024 that “the smell of the yarn is unbearable”, several were sure there was no way this was real cashmere.

Well processed yarn doesn’t come with an “unbearable” smell and you can buy plenty of acrylic yarn that doesn’t feel itchy or loose its colour. I have a rather atopic skin (aka I am allergic to a couple of things), but I never got “itchy skin” from acrylic yarn. Merino is renowned for its softness and someone finding it “very sharp” to their skin is a concern.
A few days ago, I came across several photos of people complaining of getting an “allergic reaction” and one review of someone showing their hand with a big red rash. I haven’t been able to find these comments today and I wonder if Temu just wiped them off as I found these comments in the very same wools I came across today. But as we are dealing with dropshippers and not directly with wool manufacturors, maybe Temu has an algorythm that downgrades those dropshippers who receive too many bad reviews. But the same images keep coming up, so selling a product that got bad reviews doesn’t in itself make a product get kicked out of the website. I noticed that some of these items have exceedingly little number of reviews compared to the total number of sales.

In November 2024, South Korean authorities revealed that some Temu kids’ clothes were several hundred times above the legal limit for toxins substances! So when I wrote above that “, the regime currently acts as if it doesn’t care one bit about the health and safety of foreign customers”, this is what I have in mind. And it worries me when I read loads of reviews from people who share that they intend to knit garments for their grandchildren/kids with their yarn purchase from Temu. I think to myself, if Temu is exporting toxic clothes to South Korean kids, what about their wool ? Could it be that the foul smell is not only unpleasant but due to toxic chemicals ? Where does the “itchiness” come from ? Could it be that some wool is unsafe to knit with ? If you knit a yarn with large pieces of polyester that look like “thinly cut poleyster bag”, could it be that you are in contact with phthalate plasticizers like the ones that were found in the clothes?

I tried to find some info on whether some consumer organisation might have tested the safety of the yarn on Temu, but I didn’t find any info. So what you are about to read is just my own ramblings on what MIGHT be causing the dreadful smell or the yarn’s itchiness.
Wool is dyed using chemical dyes, and if these are not properly washed out, they can leave a strong chemical smell. Direct contact with residual dyes can cause skin irritation, especially for people with sensitive skin or allergies. Amongst the dyes that could be used, azo dyes are of particular concern. Azo dyes are effective and cheap, but the problem is that some of them are carcigonetic. That’s the reason why they are banned in the European Union. In theory, we needn’t be afraid as Temu has to comply with our regulation. But indeed, this is theoretical. In theory, selling cadmium or lead liced jewelry is also totally impossible and… yet, Temu has been caught selling exactly this!
Formaldehyde-based resins applied on poleyster can fill in irregularities on the yarn’s surface, making it feel smoother and softer to the touch. This effect creates a superficial “luxury” feel. Such resins can also reduce the sharp, plasticky feel often associated with polyester. These resins are cheap and widely available. Formaldehyde residue are known to create skin irritation and/or allergic reaction. Formaldehyde is carcigonetic too, especiallly long–time exposure. See why I am concerned with all these “O, such a lovely soft wool, it’ll be perfect for my baby” comments? Formaldehyde is not outright banned, but its use in textile is heavily regulated. And what did the Koreans find? That Shein was not respecting its regulation at all. For clothes for kids. See why I find it very hard to trust that Temu’s dropshippers are not selling poleyster yarn containing too much of those all so convenient formaldehyde-based resins ?

This has been a very long updating! At first I was just looking on whether or not Temu is selling wool at bargain prices. The answer was a resounding no in 2023 and it is still a big no in 2024. I expanded this update because I think there is a reasonable doubt on whether the yarn sold on Temu is safe to use.
Do you think I am being overcautious? Do you share my concerns?