We consider bright solitons supported by a symmetric inhomogeneous defocusing nonlinearity growing rapidly enough toward the periphery of the medium, combined with an antisymmetric gain-loss profile. Despite the absence of any symmetric modulation of the linear refractive index, which is usually required to establish a parity-time (PT ) symmetry in the form of a purely real spectrum of modes, we show that the PT symmetry is never broken in the present system, and that the system always supports stable bright solitons, i.e., fundamental and multipole ones. This fact is connected to the nonlinearizability of the underlying evolution equation. The high current interest in parity-time (PT )-symmetric systems with complex potentials is partially motivated by the remarkable behavior of the corresponding linear spectrum, which remains purely real until the strength of the imaginary part of the potential attains a certain PTsymmetry breaking threshold, above which it becomes complex [1]. The effect has been experimentally observed in optics, where the similarity of the paraxial evolution equation, governing the propagation of light beams in media with an even spatial profile of the refractive-index modulation and an odd gain-loss profile, with the Schrö-dinger equation governing the evolution of the quantummechanical wave function in a complex potential, enables visualization of the PT symmetry and its breakup at a critical point [2]. While eigenmodes of linear PT -symmetric potentials are well-understood [1,3,4], the evolution of nonlinear excitations in them remains a subject of active research. In particular, the properties of solitons and discrete nonlinear modes have been studied in free-standing As mentioned previously, a generic property of PT -symmetric structures is that they support stable excitations only if the spectrum of the associated linear system is real, i.e., the symmetry is not broken. As a result, the stability domain of nonlinear excitations, if defined in terms of the gain-loss strength, often coincides with the domain of the unbroken PT symmetry in the respective linear system. However, systems may be prepared to be nonlinearizable, i.e., the nonlinear terms in the underlying evolution equation cannot be omitted even for the decaying tails of localized nonlinear excitations. Under such conditions, no direct link can be drawn between the spectra of the nonlinear system and its linear counterpart.In this Letter, we address that case in a system with an odd gain-loss profile and defocusing nonlinearity, whose local strength grows toward the periphery. In the absence of gain and loss, such a system supports bright solitons in all three dimensions [24][25][26][27][28]. Existence of bright solitons in spite of the self-defocusing nature of the nonlinearity is at first counterintuitive, but actually it is a consequence of the nonlinearizability of the respective nonlinear Schrödinger equation on the soliton tails. In this Letter, we show that a system of this type, with an even profile of the growing no...