At a certain point in my life, after years in academia, I was invited by L’Oréal to join its R&D division. With all of my experience in photobiology and epigenetics I felt diminished—wrongly so, I must say, when I learned that one of the projects for the department of biology was to analyze the warm and soapy waters in which panelists had dipped their hands for determined time intervals. The goal of the project was to identify the lipids released by the skin when washed with warm soapy water, and to prepare products containing those lipids to restore the pristine lipid status of the skin of people who washed dishes and laundry by hand…without gloves.

Household appliances are now more widely used and such a project, at least for people in the Western world, might appear obsolete. And yet, the attention paid by researchers and marketing executives to the effect of ingredients for washing laundry or dishes is not decreasing. When proteases were first added to laundry detergent powders, the effect was fantastic: even peach stains were removed from fabrics! And yet, those products were withdrawn from the market because they were unsafe. Their safety was questioned not only because apparently some consumers found that fabrics washed with those powders were able to trigger an undesirable itch, but mainly because the suspension in air of the proteases and the detergent powders constituted a toxic mixture, dangerous for the lungs of workers in the manufacturing process. And by the way, this is perhaps one of the reasons why adding proteases to exfoliators, for instance, has never become fashionable: not because of the potential harm made by the proteases themselves to the skin of the consumer, but for fear that a toxic protease-containing aerosol might be generated in the space surrounding the vats where the emulsions are prepared.

What About Laundry Detergents Now?

With the huge progress in biotech and immunology, in chemistry and dermatology, let alone the advancement in household technologies, one might ask whether it is still reasonable to worry about the risks, dangers and drawbacks of the products used to wash fabrics that will then remain in intimate contact with our bodies for many hours. And indeed, nowadays, many manufacturers and distributors of laundry detergents put more emphasis on the plastic packaging that ends up littering the environment and on the environmental friendliness of the ingredients than on the efficacy of the detergent. There is a near-general consensus, for instance, to avoid brighteners, harsh detergents, allergizing fragrances, phthalates, 1,4-dioxane, parabens, and the chemicals listed in California prop 65.

What appears to be most welcome, as of today, are products free of plastic packaging and made up of sheets of biodegradable material saturated with plant-based detergents (whatever it means), conditioned in boxes made of recycled biodegradable paper. 

One of these products is sold as “non-toxic, plant based laundry detergent.” To understand the real meaning of this pitch, I went and read the ingredient list. It contains sodium dodecyl sulfate (that is far from being a mild detergent of botanical origin), polyvinyl alcohol (a synthetic polymer, not of botanical origin), starch, cocamidopropyl betaine (a synthetic surfactant), lauraminopropylamine oxide (shown to be toxic to aquatic life: at concentrations between 3 and 18 mg/liter it kills fishes, crustaceans and algae in less than four days), sodium fatty acids (are they of botanical origins?), glucoside polyoxyethylene ether, natural saponin, sunflower oil, tea oil, protease, citric acid, glycerin and undescribed fragrances (that might have irritating or allergizing effects). The novelty here is the protease (of unspecified origin) that is close to the end of the list, and therefore can be suspected to be present at very low concentration.

Other brands offering laundry detergents claim to “tackle dirty laundry with clean science.” One brand uses a cocktail of polymer-digesting enzymes such as subtilisin (a protease secreted by bacilli), alpha-amylase and mannanase (two enzymes able to digest polysaccharides) together with cellulase and pectin lyase  (two enzymes able to digest the tough fibers in plant cell walls). These enzymes target stains and odors at their source, that is, on the fabric, while being extra gentle for the fabrics themselves and for the environment.

The enzymes are formulated with nontoxic ingredients such lauryl glucoside, water, caprylyl/capryl glucoside, glycerine, capryloyl/caproyl methyl glucamide, coconut fatty acid, sodium citrate, potassium hydroxide, propanediol, sodium hydroxide and propylene glycol. The fragrances used in these products are made of natural and synthetic ingredients selected from the IFRA Transparency List: ethyl linalool, 2H-pyran-4-ol, tetrahydro-4-methyl-2-(2-methylpropyl), linalyl acetate, phenyl ethyl alcohol, Trimofix, terpineol, and cis jasmone.

For real dirty laundry, this same brand proposes a “booster” to be used with the “normal” product added in the washing machine according to a curiously hocus-pocus-like protocol: first the booster, then the dirty laundry, and finally the product itself, and only then one can start the washer. The booster contains the following ingredients: sodium carbonate, sodium percarbonate, sodium citrate, deoxyribonuclease, sodium silicate, tartaric acid, sodium carboxymethyl cellulose and sorbitan caprylate.

I must confess, I have not been able to find a plausible reason for the addition of desoxyribonuclease (the enzyme that digests DNA) in the “booster.”

The brand proposes products with different scents that feature a “subtle and sophisticated” prestige scent with notes of magnolia, bergamot and cedar (as a former photobiologist, I would not recommend bergamot in something that will end up on the skin that could then find itself exposed to solar radiation!) and is claimed to be free of all EU listed fragrance allergens.

Conclusion

Once again, we have to call the attention of the reader and of the consumer to the difference between advertising and reality. Be it for skin care products or for washing laundry, miracles do not happen easily and even claims of eco-friendliness can be outrageously unjustified. There are two things that everyone should do before buying something that is associated with some formidable claim: read the list of ingredients and ask: “How do we know it?”

Paolo Giacomoni, PhD of Insight Analysis Consulting acts as an independent consultant to the skin care industry. He served as executive director of Research at Estée Lauder and was head of the department of biology with L’Oréal. He has built a record of achievements through research on DNA damage and metabolic impairment induced by UV radiation as well as on the positive effects of vitamins and antioxidants. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and has more than 20 patents. He is presently head of R&D with L.RAPHAEL—The science of beauty—Geneva, Switzerland. His email is: paologiac@gmail.com.