“Join the scent-sation!” screams the Herbal Essences Facebook group. Despite the painful headline, more than 6,400 hair-scrubbers ascribe to the group, professing their loyalty to the shampoo. Proctor & Gamble, the behemoth behind Herbal Essences, Swiffer mops and Febreze in addition to Eukanuba dog food, Pepto-Bismol and Pringles chips, deserves our respect for garnering such consumer loyalty. To watch commercials advertising their line of cleaning products, one would think we live in squalor. Beware! The kitchen sink threatens to expose you and your children to a cavalry of germs (of which Proctor & Gamble can help you kill 99.1 percent). Clearly, we prioritize cleanliness.
Yet with so many different products, how are you to choose? Are you washing your feet, the bathtub, dishes, or clothes? Would you like a bar or a bottle? If a bottle, do you like gels, liquids or foams? Perhaps you prefer creams. Better yet, just buy a soft pad with the cleansing agent already inside so you can throw the dirt out with the trash. Fortunately, we have companies like Proctor & Gamble to help us sort through the mess by offering an endless stream of products, or so it appears. In fact, Proctor & Gamble encourages the mess by convincing consumers to dedicate cabinets and hall closets to cleaning supplies, each with its own purpose and cost.
Cleaning products represent repackaged, reformulated versions of soap. The origins of the most basic form of soap date back to at least 600 BC, but it remained a scarce commodity until manufacturing advances increased its availability in the late 18th century. Historically, soap contained tallow, ashes and water. Tallow is rendered beef or mutton fat and still appears in commercial soaps as sodium tallowate. If the use of animal by-products concerns you, start checking labels because tallow permeates nearly all hard soaps on Duane Reade’s shelves. But in reality, many of the cleaning products we buy are not soaps at all.
Proctor & Gamble’s flourishing cleaning business relies more heavily on detergents, which, like so many synthetics, entered the domestic realm during World War II. In making soap, a process called saponification, an acid (usually lye) and a base (tallow or vegetable oil) react to form a salt composed of glycerin and soap itself. However when mixed with water soap can leave a precipitate that remains as residue on bathtubs, dishes and clothes. Detergents, in contrast, stay in solution and disappear down the drain with the dirty water. Yet the drawbacks of synthetic detergents lead one to question their value.
The Environmental Working Group’s Web site rates cosmetic products on a scale of one to 10, in which the most pernicious products merit tens. L’Oréal’s “Pure Zone Pore Unclogging Scrub Cleanser,” a commercial detergent, receives a nine out of 10 for a host of reasons, one of which is that it contains polyethylene. The Web site lists over 1,400 cosmetic products containing polyethylene, the substance of plastic bags, ranging from lip balm to blush. Besides the obvious environmental problems with washing plastic down the drain, do you really want to exfoliate by rubbing polyethylene on your face? Household cleaners present similar concerns regarding the toxicity of synthetic additives. Even most self-proclaimed “natural” detergents, whether for hair or dishes, contain synthetic compounds recognized for their noxious qualities. To the extent that you will worry about the effects of chemical additives, products with fewer unrecognizable ingredients are better. Suave shampoo, for instance, resembles many eco-friendly hair products because of its short ingredient list, which also makes it cheap.
As an alternative to these unattractive options, using lye (sodium hydroxide), fat, and water you can make your own soap. With a couple of sturdy bowls, a stirring spoon, rubber gloves—as an acid, lye is caustic—and plastic molds, the process is straightforward. Dissolve the lye in water, heat the fat, mix in the lye, then let the mixture mature.
Ultimately, most people will stick to their array of store-bought products to uphold familiar standards of cleanliness. More economical or concerned consumers will seek out a relatively harmless all-purpose soap that tackles hair, clothes, dishes, and counters at once. Alternatively, one can stock up on baking soda and vinegar, safe for teeth but powerful enough to unclog drains. In any case, I recommend against using WD-40 on your sandwich press, as a friend of mine once did, or investing in an array of bath products without checking the labels. By cleaning yourself and your household with increasingly more engineered and complex products, you will support a fear-mongering industry that trades old-fashioned dirt for invisible toxic grime.
In part, the threat of inadequate hygiene merits consumers’ zeal for cleanliness. Florence Nightingale saved hundreds of lives by advocating the benefits of washing your hands. Nonetheless, products like Herbal Essences “No Flakin’ Way” shampoo promise no such cure, despite Facebook group members’ claims that “it smells like heaven in a bottle!” Proctor & Gamble, fighting for your right to bear arms in the war on germs, will take that message to heart.
Becky Davies is a Columbia College junior majoring in urban studies.
Home Ec runs alternate Mondays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com
