So I’m washing some dishes and it occurs to me that I’m using a product that I don’t need…matter of fact we all are.
Fine, the citrus in the liquid cuts through grease but so does hot water.
Squeaky clean and sparkling? just the same using hot water without WUL
Gives the whole kitchen a great smelling burst of freshness??
Well I dunno about you but my kitchen doesn’t exactly smell like a tomcats arse in high summer.
So why do we use this totally uneccessary product?
There’s this little thing called surfactants …
My father was washing his dishes with disinfectant hand soap and it drove me crazy. We actually had to go out and buy him dish soap.
Dawn, and ONLY Dawn, is worth the money. The others are massively inferior. You do NOT save money by buying cheap-ass soap.
Hot water does not cut through grease the same way soap does. You can test this yourself. Go coat your hands with Crisco or lard. Now wash your hands with hot water until all the grease is gone.
We’ll wait.
I’ll go make myself a sandwich.
Maybe give myself a pedicure.
OK, now that you’re finished – oh, still not finished? OK, I have a book to read.
Yeah, OK. Now do the same thing and wash your hands with hot water and just a drop or two of dishwashing soap. See the difference?
That being said I’ll agree that you really don’t need very much of the stuff to do a good job.
If I wash my hands with hot water and bathroom soap you can bet I’ll get rid of any grease without having to use dishwash soap.
So, how was the sandwich? and BTW the cook did it, the bastard
Are you arguing that we should wash the dishes with bathroom soap? I thought the OP was saying use no soap at all.
Your experience is different from mine. I find that if I was several items, one after the other, by the time I get to the end, the grease that has been washed off the earlier dishes is settling on the last ones, and anything plastic won’t get anywhere close to clean.
I suppose I could do something similar with just water, but that would involve a whole lot more water and a lot longer time.
That being said, it takes a lot less soap then most people I know use. But that’s true of dish soap, dish washer soap and laundry soap as well.
A lot of hand soaps leave a fragrance on my hands; dish soap, although aromatic, doesn’t seem to leave any sort of scent on my plate.
Another issue is that good dish soaps (read: DAWN) are really aggressive on grease, to the point where they’ll strip the oils right out of your skin. This is why you want gloves if you’re going to be washing a whole sinkload of dishes by hand. (the flip side of this is that when my hands are ridiculously dirty from wrenching on a car/bike, I come to the kitchen and wash my hands with dish soap instead of hand soap.) Hand soaps are typically a compromise between good degreasing/cleansing qualities and being gentle on your skin; they sometimes use ingredients like lanolin, which is not what you want when you’re trying to achieve squeaky-clean dishes.
Tell me something, Jeremy…have you ever tried doing the washing up without the washing up liquid?
Do Brits get Dawn? I thought you all just had “mild, green FAIRY liquid!”
I am amazed at the number of folks who don’t understand how washing up liquid works.
To avoid making other dishes greasy, wash the greasy dishes LAST.
Slight hijack: Those dish washing liquid commercials really annoy the hell out of me when they DON’T SCRAPE THE DISHES BEFORE WASHING! I mean, how gross can you get? Scrape the leftover food *off *before putting them in the sink!!! Things that need to be soaked: You soak them, soften the food, drain the water, THEN SCRAPE THEM BEFORE WASHING! – Ahem. Sorry. End of slight hijack.
No we don’t have Dawn WUL and I guess that Fairy is the best seller, it comes in various colours BTW, not just green
We do have other brands of course, Persil being just one and there are the store brands which are quite useless compared to Fairy and Persil.
I don’t use a sponge when washing dishes, I much prefer one of those nylon scrub thingies.
As for piling dirty dishes in the sink, I don’t do that either.
Living on my own (sob) I usually have just a couple of plates +cutlery+pans to wash not a great deal of washing to be done there
Unless I have visitors of course, then the workload more than doubles
Hey hey HEY! Don’t be dissin’ store brand liquid. I use Tesco’s “naturally effective lemon washing up liquid”.* For some reason they don’t keep it near the artificial, ineffectual washing up liquid. It’s usually right in the middle of the laundry detergent. I guess the boffins in Cheshunt know something I don’t.
FWIW, Fairy Yellow/Lemon is the same as Lemon Joy in the US, right down to the bottle shape.