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We have removed outdated information. We continue to stand by our top pick, Seventh Generation’s Dish Soap. Oem Tpr Scrub Brush Factory
Whether you’re tackling a sink full of dishes or just washing your chef’s knife, a squirt of dish soap is likely part of your daily routine. And you want something that works well and smells good (or, at least doesn’t smell awful).
After more than 65 hours of research to make Seventh Generation’s Dish Soap our top pick in 2016, we’ve used it daily in the Wirecutter test kitchen and our own homes. Seventh Generation’s Dish Soap is still the best soap for hand-washing dishes. Out of the 28 dishwashing detergents we tested, it has the best combination of cleaning power, safety, price, and social responsibility.
You can’t beat the cleaning power of Seventh Generation. Bonus: It’s cheap, it skips the synthetic fragrances, and it isn’t tested on animals.
Seventh Generation’s Dish Soap rinses clean from the sponge and cuts through grease better than most soaps we’ve tested. We stick to the unscented version in Wirecutter’s test kitchen, but you can also get it in a variety of plant-derived scents. We’ve tried the clementine zest and lemongrass scent, which was lovely and not overpowering. Plus, because the liquid is clear, it’s great for using a little on your shirt if you spill a bit of food on yourself.
The Seventh Generation Dish Soap was one of the top performers in our tests, along with Dawn’s Original Dishwashing Liquid. But it edged out the competition because it doesn’t contain any dyes or synthetic fragrances, which are often made with questionable ingredients. We’ve also found that Dawn’s dish soap tends to give sponges a strong mildewy scent over time, even if you’re careful about rinsing and wringing out the sponge after every use. We’ve never had that issue with Seventh Generation’s soap.
Many other detergents we tested fell into the “very, very good” category, including dye-free Dawn, as well as those from Joy, Planet, Citra Solv, Kirkland Signature, and Palmolive—you probably can’t go wrong with most name-brand dish detergents. But ultimately, Seventh Generation hits all of the right notes for us.
The primary job of a dish detergent is to get oil and grease off your dishes. Almost all dish liquids available can do this to varying degrees—it’s the degrees that matter. You might also be looking for a detergent that has a minimum of worrisome ingredients and is easier on your conscience.
The author of the previous version of this guide, Leigh Krietsch Boerner, holds a chemistry PhD. She read existing dish soap reviews from major publications as well as ingredient reviews from places like the Environmental Working Group. She also spoke to professor Brian Grady, a surfactant expert and director of the Institute for Applied Surfactant Research at the University of Oklahoma; professor Jennifer Field, an environmental and molecular toxicologist at Oregon State University; and Cara Bondi, a research and development manager at Seventh Generation.
We tested 28 nationally available dish detergents but did not include any that were labeled as antibacterial. In 2017, the FDA banned a range of antibacterial ingredients from certain soaps because of evidence that they might harm long-term health. Though some dish soap manufacturers have removed those particular antibacterials, the FDA ruling didn’t require them to do so. Also, there’s not enough evidence showing antibacterial soaps work better than plain soap and water. Boerner also didn’t test the different fragrances of the same type of detergent, since we assumed that these would have the same basic formula, and therefore performance. (Fragrances don’t have any role in the chemistry that gets our dishes clean.)
When setting up a testing method, we ran into two problems. First, it’s difficult to bake on a set amount of grease to a dish or pan. Second, short of building a scrubbing robot, it’s also hard to wash a dish with the same amount of pressure and strokes each time. So that makes the most obvious test—just washing some dirty dishes—not really work. Instead, we talked to surfactant expert Brian Grady.
We mixed vegetable oil with some oil-soluble food coloring and brushed a thin layer on a plate. We let this sit for 5 minutes, then placed two oil-coated dishes in the bottom of a tub containing 5 milliliters of detergent and 10 liters of approximately 70 °F water. We made sure to add the detergent after the tub was filled and mixed gently to discourage foaming. We beat the mixture with a handheld egg beater for 2 minutes to agitate the surfactants in the detergent. Surfactants (short for surface-active agents) are the soap-like molecules in cleaning products that bind oil and water together so they can be washed away. Then we pulled the dish out, laid it flat, and eyeballed how much oil was remaining on the plates. Finally, we took the cleaner plate (in most cases the two plates were virtually identical) and compared it with the control. The less oil remaining on the plate, the better the detergent is at cleaning.
This method works in a couple of ways. It measures how the detergent—by itself—can work to clean away oil, which is the point of a dish detergent. It also leaves out the scrubbing factor, which might make people think that their detergent is working harder than it is. Because really, if you scrub hard enough with any detergent, your dish will come clean. However, since we were eyeballing the remaining oil and not using a machine to tell us precisely how much food coloring was left behind, we had to put the detergents into relative categories: excellent (5% to 10% oil remaining), very, very good (10% to 15% oil left), very good (15%), good (20%), okay (25%), and poor (35%). For reference, the control had about 40% of the oil left on the plate. Only two soaps (from Seventh Generation and Dawn) fell into the excellent category in our tests, but many others qualified as very, very good.
Most companies put two main surfactants in their dish liquid: sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) and sodium lauryl ether sulfate (SLES). As surfactant expert Brian Grady explained, SLES is a modified version of SLS, and it has the benefit of creating less soap scum. These surfactants aren’t a concern in and of themselves, but when you make SLES from SLS, the reaction creates a small amount of a compound called 1,4-dioxane, which can be hazardous in high doses. Manufacturers can remove this contaminant from surfactants through a process called vacuum stripping, but some may still make it into the finished bottle of detergent. And because it’s a contaminant and not an ingredient, detergent companies aren’t required to include it on the label.
1,4-dioxane is enough of a concern that New York recently banned cleaning and personal care items that contain more than trace concentrations of it, and other states have programs where manufacturers must report if products for children contain the chemical above certain limits. But a risk evaluation completed by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2020 found “no unreasonable risks to consumers” from dish soaps that contain 1,4-dioxane as a by-product. It probably helps that dish soap is best used in small amounts, diluted with water. If you’re still worried about it, wearing dish gloves will create a barrier between your skin and the soap. (We like the Glam-Gloves Dishwashing Gloves and the latex-free Clorox Ultra Comfort Gloves.)
Phthalates—a class of chemicals known as plasticizers—make hard plastics more flexible and therefore harder to break. Phthalates are found in hundreds of products, and CDC researchers have found phthalates (or metabolites) in many people they tested, leading them to say that exposure is “widespread.” In dish detergent, phthalates tend to be used in the fragrance mixture.
The CDC’s fact sheet on phthalates says, “Human health effects from exposure to low levels of phthalates are not as clear. More research is needed to assess the human health effects of exposure to phthalates.” The FDA says that phthalates don’t pose a safety risk the way they’re used in cosmetics right now, but they’re keeping an eye on it. You won’t see anything that looks like a phthalate on the outside of a dish detergent bottle—per FDA rules, companies are not required to list the ingredients of a fragrance. However, choosing fragrance-free dish detergent will probably help you steer clear of this one if you want to. And many detergents, such as the one from Seventh Generation, tend not to use phthalates and advertise that on the label.
This article was based on reporting by Leigh Krietsch Boerner. It was edited by Annemarie Conte and Marguerite Preston.
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Wholesale Toilet Cleaning Brush Set Distributor Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).