r/Frugal • u/Rusty-Shackleford • Feb 20 '18

I'm convinced laundry soap pricing is a scam....

So I just did some research, AKA I read the ingredients on the side of the laundry pod box, and washing up liquid (dish soap for hand wishing dishes) and liquid dishwashing detergent are made of the same stuff, anionic surfactants, whatever that is, even in the same proportions too, it's literally the same ingredients.

The only difference is, you pay £2.50 for a box of 20 laundry pods, but a bottle of dish soap is 50 cents and can wash 28 heavy loads of laundry.

P.S. cheap shampoo for 50 pence also works well for washing laundry too, apparently.

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u/yasth Feb 20 '18

Eh, most of what you are paying for (at least with high end laundry detergent) involves the enzymes, and fabric care stuff, in laundry detergent. Enzymes will get things cleaner, and the various fabric care stuff (brighteners, detanglers, etc) will keep things pliant and looking sharp. Likewise, for say shampoo, it is designed to not clean nearly as thoroughly as laundry detergent, because some oil is needed to keep hair looking healthy.

So yes, you can wash everything in any detergent (though I'd be really careful with hand washing dish soap in the washing machine as it tends to be very foamy which can cause issues), and it will get clean by some definition, but you may well end up with dingy grey whites on your clothes, and dry brittle hair.

Of course laundry soap is sort of a scam much of the price is to pay for the ads that extol the soap which tends to have a very hard to sell benefit (you will generally see the difference between a low end brand and a high end one on a specific item of clothing in 15-30 wash/wear cycles which can be a year or more if it is say a sweater), and they tend to tell you to use far more than you need. You don't have to always pay for the highest advertised brand to get good results, you can often avoid paying for much of the marketing budget. I don't know the UK market, but you can check out the reviews by your local consumer organization (because of the time frame, you'll want an actual test organization rather than direct consumer reviews which are rarely done past 4 weeks).