Delicates Wash, for Wool Silk and Handloom

Details

Wool, pashmina, silk and fine handloom are wrecked by ordinary detergent in two specific ways, and both are chemistry rather than opinion. Wool keratin and silk fibroin are proteins held together by peptide bonds, and above about pH 8.5 alkali hydrolyses those bonds: the fibre swells, the lustre goes flat, the hand goes harsh, and none of it comes back. A normal laundry powder sits at pH 10.4. The second is the protease enzyme that every good detergent carries, which exists to digest protein soil and cannot tell a curd stain from the saree it is on. This wash is built around avoiding both, and the two numbers that matter are printed: measured pH 6.8 as supplied and 6.9 in the wash bath, and enzyme content zero. Gentle is not a claim here, it is a pH figure and an enzyme figure, and a bottle that says gentle and prints neither has told you nothing.

• Full surfactant system named and it adds to 10 percent: decyl glucoside 5 percent, coco-glucoside 3 percent, sodium cocoyl glutamate 2 percent, all nonionic or amino-acid derived, no sulphate and no anionic that would strip the fibre
• Enzymes zero, stated as a figure rather than as the word enzyme-free
• Measured pH 6.8 as supplied, 6.9 in a 10 litre bucket at dose, at 27 C
• No alkali builder, no chlorine bleach, no oxygen bleach, no optical brightener, no dye, no perfume
• Fragrance-free, so there is nothing to declare from the 26 EU-declarable fragrance allergens, and nothing to sit on raw silk and dull it
• Preserved with phenoxyethanol at 0.9 percent, which is under the 1.0 percent limit, and the replacement is named because a free-from claim with nothing named in its place is empty. We removed MIT and CMIT, the isothiazolinones behind a lot of laundry contact dermatitis, and we did not quietly put benzisothiazolinone in instead
• Why not sodium benzoate. Benzoate only works below about pH 5 and this wash sits at 6.8, so benzoate here would be a preservative in name only. The pH and the preservative are one decision, not two
• Dose is 15 ml in a 10 litre bucket of cold water, which is 16 washes from the 250 ml bottle at Rs 15.56 a wash, and 33 from the 500 ml at Rs 13.00
• It has no enzymes, so it will not shift an old curd, blood or egg mark from silk. Nothing safe for silk will. Do not reach for the stain bar either, because that bar is at pH 9.8
• Cold soak 10 minutes, squeeze without wringing, dry flat in shade. Wringing is what breaks a wet wool fibre, not the detergent