27 Feb 2023
Would you be happy to pay for ingredients in your detergent that don’t really do anything (and could actually harm your washing machine?).
No?
Yet, that’s precisely what people have been doing for decades.
Because most of those bubbles from your laundry detergent have been added purely for show by the big brands… their formulations contain pointless foaming chemicals to make the water froth up… all because we’ve been trained to think more bubbles = more cleaning.
no need to get in a froth
Of course bubbles can serve as a sort of indicator of how much soap or detergent is in the water in the first place, which in turn will affect how clean your clothes will be. However it’s only a rough indicator, and not reliable. Beyond that, there's really no connection between the amount of bubbles in your washing machine and how clean anything gets.
a pointless addition.
When detergents first came on the scene and we stopped using soap to clean our clothing, big brand manufacturers decided to add foaming agents to their detergents so we could still see those bubbles we had become so accustomed to seeing.
It was an early marketing gimmick!
And they continue to add this pointless ingredient to this day… in fact they even fine tune the amount of foaming agents for each market, as consumers in different places around the world have different expectations regarding the amount of bubbles to expect.
Here at smol we don’t believe in using chemicals needlessly. That’s why you won’t find foaming agents in our formulations and why you won’t see your machine drum filled with bubbles when you use your smol capsules.
so how does smol get clothes clean?
Our detergents use surfactants to clean. These are molecules with one end that grabs onto dirt - it really can’t resist it! And the other end of the molecule? Well, that just loves to hold tight to the water! The dirt is lifted out from the clothing and held to the surfactant in the water without the ability to then redeposit back onto the clothes.
And when the water drains away, it takes the surfactants (and the dirt they grabbed) with it.
so laundry foam is actually bad?
In a word… yes. Bubbles are going to get in the way of the clean and too much foam can actually prevent your machine from draining effectively. The bubbles will also cushion the clothing from moving against each other - and this reduced friction will also decrease the cleaning action.
we don’t believe in unnecessary chemicals and marketing gimmicks.
Which is why smol bio contains 40% less dry chemical weight per dose than Ariel and why our non-bio contains 35% less dry chemical weight than Persil non-bio and 35% less than Fairy non-bio.
smol is a low-sudsing, high-efficiency (HE) capsule and we’re committed to removing pointless chemicals and will never make customers pay for flashy gimmicks. Together we’re saving almost 100 tonnes of chemicals every month from rinsing down our drains and into our waterways. We think that’s worth celebrating and is just another example that smol things make a big difference.