What's In Your Laundry Soap?
What's In Your Laundry Soap?
Your skin wants naturally clean laundry - Tide and Fels Naptha can't provide that. Let's chat about why.
When I was a young wife and soon to be 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. You see, the soap industry is large and it has a strong ability to influence politics and lawmakers (for reasons we could discuss in a different chat). So the soap and skincare product laws have been written to accommodate their marketing style for the benefit of profits. What? Not for your health? No, for their best marketing!
The FDA does not require ingredient labeling for soap. If your favorite skin cleaning 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 legally valid. The profit-motivated, big corporation dominated, soap industry has convinced lawmakers that since soap is going to be washed off, it has no impact on your skin or your health. So ingredient disclosure and ingredient regulation is not necessary. 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?
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 washer too. You see, that Tide bottle is 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?
What about that lingering scent? Downy Unstoppables, with their “fresh up to 12 weeks” slogan, had 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 fragranced.
There’s a growing segment of the population with skin conditions that are persistently painful, yet unconquered with topical or oral drugs. But the elephant in the room not being mentioned is the chemicals being regularly rubbed onto the skin, causing irritations, yet being defined as evidence of “freshness”. It’s not fresh!!!
There are a good variety of DIY recipes available online explaining a few different methods of hand crafted laundry cleaners. Powders and liquids and a paste style, with varying additives, but most have 1 main ingredient: grated up bar soap.
Almost always, the recommended brand is the old 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, the bar in the store now is not the same.
If you want to make your own laundry soap so you know it’s truly natural or for the benefit of someone with sensitive skin, you likely don’t want to go to that much effort then add in a bar of soap that’s full of questionable ingredients.
All natural items should have simple, easy to read ingredients. This new Fels Naptha label is gonna be a challenge for any elementary reader (and some high schoolers). I have included a picture of the label. Check it out. This is a label I just recently copied from an amazon advertisement for Fels Naptha. It’s a new pic. The top middle paragraph is the ingredients list. I’d like to specifically draw your eyes to that simple short word on the second line: T a l c. If you have your nose to the natural health world, or if you simply have enough TV commercial exposure, you’ll likely remember that there’s a class action lawsuit for a huge payout amount ($ with a B) of money resulting from evidence leaked that the T a l c that was used in personal hygiene products is cancer causing, and they knew it decades ago. And they sold it anyway.
They said it won’t harm your health if it just sits on your skin… But it did. And now they are paying women large payouts of money because their lives were impacted by serious debilitating cancers. So they stopped putting it in those personal hygiene powders.
And now, they say it won’t harm your health if it washes off of your skin. But it’s a proven fact that what goes on your skin impacts your health and they admit it if they want it to —like for transdermal drugs. And sensitive skin people (think canaries) still show irritations. And remember those commercials bragging about how long their “fresh smelling” chemicals linger in fabric for weeks. So should you believe that what’s in your laundry soap, your liquid soap, your bar soap, your shampoo, etc. matters?
TALC IS STILL IN SOAP AND COSMETICS!!!
(like in this Fels Naptha label and many pressed cosmetic powders and more)!!!!! Go look for yourself!
Labels like this one how I got started. Stories like this is why I get passionate. This is why I make truly natural skin care products out of food grade, organic and sustainable ingredients. No chemicals with lawsuits, No ingredients that are cause for concern. I do it because ingredient disclosure is NOT REQUIRED on liquid laundry detergents, and so many other skin care products. Because when they do disclose it, as you can see it’s not necessarily good. What’s in the stuff they didn’t want you to read???????
Go read your favorite 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).
Going back to the Fels Naptha label, besides T a l c, there are several other wholly unnecessary ingredients in that soap made with animal fat (tallowate) and covered up with preservatives and fragrance. Real soap should not need a preservative. Real soap can have real short ingredients and they should be all natural and skin friendly. And Please, NO T a l c needed!
Moral to my rant? READ THE LABELS. And if the label looks fishy, look harder. Ask questions. You’ve got the world of information in your pocket now! Ask Google.
If you want to make a DIY all natural laundry cleaner for your family to save money or save your skin, please let me help! We make all natural soap shreds available for a price that’s very comparable to buying Fels Naptha and I can guarantee there’s no talc, no preservatives, no animal fat, and no nonsense. Check out our long list of ingredient NOs on our product website. And you don’t have to grate it up either. We already did that for you! Super simple. Super easy. Cheaper than Tide.
Now if you don’t want to look up a recipe and buy all the stuff and mix it up, we are happy to do that for you too. We have a ready to use version too! Plus we’ll add an all natural essential oil blend made of botanicals that kill bacteria that cause odors and we will keep the packaging to an eco-friendly minimum of just what’s required for shipping. If you are local, we welcome you to bring in your own container to our refilling station.
Click to get our: Soap Shreds for DIY Recipes
OR click here to get: Laundry Powder Ready to Use
Whatever you do, PLEASE read the labels! And avoid the stuff you can’t read!
Thank you for coming to my rant!
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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