No, IKEA Is Not Selling A Rainbow Pillowcase Called “PUTIN”

The Internet, while a vast and varied resource rich in information on innumerable topics, is also a rascally son of a boomerang and will often regurgitate fiction as fact. To that end: Though a photo circulating Twitter yesterday appeared to show a rainbow-striped pillowcase called the “PUTIN” on sale at an IKEA store, the company says it doesn’t sell that particular item anymore and oh yeah, it was never named after the president of Russia.

According to a report by The Independent, the photo making the Internet rounds since yesterday morning purporting to show a scene from a Stockholm branch of the store is all a lie. Perhaps the odd mouthless emoticon next to the “49” tipped someone off?

Social media users had pointed to the rainbow stripes as perhaps a poke at Russian anti-homosexuality laws. The company recently announced that it would shut down its online lifestyle magazine in that country so it wouldn’t potentially violate a law that forbids the promotion of gay values to minors, the Independent notes.

But an IKEA spokesman has confirmed that the pillowcase isn’t for sale anymore, was never named PUTIN — it was called SKARUM — and besides, the company wouldn’t make statements like that in any case. And a quick images search of SKARUM backs that up as well.

“We stopped selling the product in October 2014 to make way for new designs in our range. We can’t comment on the origin of the photo as the name of the cushion was SKARUM the entire time it was on sale,” the rep told the Independent. “However, we would never make political statements with the naming of our products.”

Here, we fixed it:

Edited.

IKEA Rainbow Putin pillow is a fake [The Independent]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist