Is Your Laundry Healthy?
If your skin is itchy, it might be your laundry habits - Let's chat about why.
When I was a young wife and mother, I wanted to make good, healthy, natural choices for my family and my home. The more I searched, the more I became aware that the laws for “wash-off products” like soap, were not even close to what I thought they were! I bet they are not what you think they are either.
Shall We Do Some MYTH BUSTING?
The customer is NOT always a priority. The soap industry is stockholder profit based, and it has a strong ability to influence politics and lawmakers. The soap and skincare product laws have been written primarily to accommodate their lobbying and their marketing style for the benefit of profits, shareholders, and boardrooms. Protection of your health concerns is secondary at best! Class action style lawsuits have repeatedly proven that. If the laws were primarily written to protect your interests - class action lawsuits would be unusual, but instead, we have social media filled with lawyer commercials looking for the injured by the latest class action lawsuit defendent. ( it’s talc currently)
The FDA does not require ingredient labeling for soap. If your favorite smelling, clean sounding, skincare products meet the FDA's definition of “wash-off”, it is exempt from the provisions of the FD&C Act, making any ingredient disclosure totally voluntary. That also means that partial disclosure is also legally valid so long as they say it “right” legally. The profit-motivated, big corporation dominated, soap industry has lobbied to convince lawmakers that since soap is going to be washed off, it has genuinely no impact on your skin or your health, and passing laws to make ingredient disclosure and ingredient regulation unnecessary. They say your skin won’t absorb any toxicity from a wash-off product. That’s the official position.
How do you feel about that? Do you think it’s true in the real world of greasy hands and dirty children? I don’t. And I am not alone. I have talked to many people and heard many stories in the past 30 years of my awareness of this law style, and most people I have talked to with sensitivities say their allergies are indeed impacted by wash-off product ingredients.
Are you feeling confused? What’s wash-off soap got to do with the laundry heading we started with? Does it seem like we changed topics? Well, not really. You needed a brief peek into the laws of this industry called soap.
Those soap rules apply in your washing machine too. You see, that bottle of laundry detergent is under that same law and exempt from ingredient disclosure too. Yeah, it doesn’t directly go on your skin like a liquid hand soap, but does it impact your skin? Why do they sell “baby safe” and “sensitive skin” laundry soaps if it doesn’t matter? (because consumers said it matters)
Go read your favorite big name liquid laundry detergent brand’s ingredient label. Most read something like this: “water, ionic and non-ionic surfactants, color and fragrance”. They might add a vague bleaching or deodorizing agent type word too. What’s actually in it? Did you read the list and actually know? What exactly is an ionic and non-ionic surfactant? Well, a surfactant is something that releases dirt-like substances from your clothes. Ionic and non-ionic are describing the type, but the origin and type of chemical used is not typically disclosed (there are a lot of them that are known skin irritants and worse).
What about that lingering scent? Remember that “fresh up to 12 weeks” slogan, a name brand used on a set of commercials where the actors sniffed stored clothes and bragged about how “fresh” they still smelled weeks later? Trouble is, their definition of fresh is not fresh, but strongly fragranced. (some called it allergenic not fresh)
There’s a growing segment of the population with skin conditions that are persistently painful, yet unconquered with topical or oral drugs (with side effects that require another drug).
Could it be that the chemicals retained in the fabric to make it “brighter and fresher” are also being regularly rubbed onto the skin of the wearer, causing irritations? Evidence says a resounding YES! Yet it is still being defined as “freshness”. It’s not fresh!!! (It’s fragranced and chemicalized and creating a drug customer)
HOW CAN YOU MAKE A HEALTHIER CHOICE FOR YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY?
HERE’S TWO OPTIONS - buy something truly natural OR make it yourself.
1. If you are a DIY kind of person:
there is a good variety of easy to make, washer safe, DIY recipes available online explaining a few different methods of hand crafted laundry cleaners. They use a variety of ingredients, but most have 1 main ingredient in common: grated up bar soap.
BE AWARE: Almost always, the recommended brand of bar soap a DIY recipe uses is the standard bar soap brand, “Fels Naptha”. It’s considered an old fashioned stain remover by many, and the label claims it’s “Grandma’s answer to laundry stains”. Trouble is, this is not your grandmother’s Fels Naptha soap! IF your grandma bought Fels Naptha, hers was not made by a profit motivated large corporation, and the bar in the store today does not have the same ingredients or the same process, and if you want truly natural you don’t want Fels Naptha.
READ MY OTHER LAUNDRY POST ON FELS NAPTHA’s LABEL
Instead of Fels Naptha’s questionable ingredients, please buy a truly natural bar soap made with natural healthy ingredients. Personally, I prefer to not have to grind that bar up with a difficult hand grater because I know that Pamper Me Naturally sells quality soap made from natural ingredients, ALREADY GROUND UP IN FINE BITS for a similar price to Fels Naptha and I am not voting for the big corp with my market dollars. (link below)
2. Buy A Truly Natural Laundry Cleaner
Support a brand who makes a product with the quality ingredients you want and without the greenwashing or skin irritations you don’t want.
You can find my favorite brand of Pamper Me Naturally Soap Shreds OR Ready To Use Pamper Me Naturally Laundry Powder: HERE
All natural items should have simple, easy to read ingredients.
What’s actually in it? Can you read the list and actually know? Do fall into the greenwashing trap.
All natural soap shreds available for a price that’s very comparable to buying Fels Naptha and there’s no talc, no preservatives, no animal fat, and no nonsense in it. Check out Pamper Me Naturally and read the PMN Promise, it’s a long list of ingredient NOs. And you don’t have to grate it up either!
Save time, save the stress of concern of ingredients, and for a similar cost!
You can find my favorite brand of Pamper Me Naturally Soap Shreds OR Ready To Use Pamper Me Naturally Laundry Powder: HERE
Whatever you do, PLEASE read the labels! And avoid the stuff you can’t read!
Thank you for coming to my chat!
And that my friend, is a few words more than our “5 minute chat time”.
So I will bid you adieu for this round of tea, with a virtual hug, I will ask you to,
Come Back Soon!
As Always, Thanks for taking the time to read!
-Suzy
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Views expressed are those of the author and not legal or medical advice.