Laundry Stain Bar

Details

A pre-treatment bar for the four marks that decide whether a shirt lasts another season: collar and cuff grime, haldi, cooking oil and ink. Wet the cloth, rub the bar on the mark, wait five minutes, then wash as usual. IS 285 is the BIS specification for a laundry soap and it grades a bar on total fatty matter, which is the single number saying how much of the bar is soap and how much is filler and water. That figure is almost never printed on a wrapper, and it is the whole cheat in this category: a bar can be a third salt and carbonate, feel identical in the hand, wear away in half the time, and still be sold at the same price. The second cheat is the colour. A mainstream stain bar is bright blue or green, and that dye is decoration on an object whose only job is to be rubbed into white cotton.

• Total fatty matter 60 percent, measured per lot by the method in IS 285 at a NABL-accredited chemical laboratory
• The soap is the sodium salt of coconut and rice bran fatty acids, and the non-soap surfactant is sodium C12-14 alkyl polyglucoside at 4 percent, so the whole surfactant system is named and adds to 64 percent
• Glycerine 6 percent, which is what stops a bar cracking through a dry April, and moisture under 12 percent so the pack weight is bar and not water
• Measured pH 9.8 in a 1 percent solution at 27 C, which is alkaline, because soap is alkaline and a bar claiming to be pH neutral is either not soap or not telling you
• No dye, no perfume, no chlorine bleach, no phosphate, no optical brightener, no filler beyond the salt matrix a bar needs to hold together
• No enzymes, and no enzyme claim. A protease will not survive two years on a shelf at pH 9.8, so a bar that says it contains enzymes and prints no figure is telling you nothing
• No preservative, because at under 12 percent moisture the water activity is too low for anything to grow, which is a reason rather than a free-from claim
• It is soap, so above about 300 ppm hardness it leaves a faint grey scum on the treated patch until the wash rinses it out. The 4 percent alkyl polyglucoside is there to cut that, not to abolish it
• It will not lift set ink, rust, or a haldi mark that has already been through a hot dryer. Nothing in this range will, and a bar that says otherwise is guessing
• Colour safe to ISO 105-C06, though hand-dyed and bandhani should still be tested on a hidden seam, because a hand dye is not a tested dye