system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How does fabric softener work?
gpt
So fabric has lots of little fibers of which it consists.  If you look at your clothes, you'll see little short tiny fibers sticking out in all kinds of directions.  Fabric softeners cause all those little fibers to more prominently 'stick up', as opposed to being more 'pressed against' the fabric.  As more of those fibers stick up, the fabric feels softer as those fibers provide some bounce and rebound when we touch it.

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On a related note, silk feels extremely smooth because the fibers that make up the fabric tend to bind very well to the fabric - there aren't a lot of bits of fibers pointing off in random directions.