We were attempting to reduce our plastic waste, but it seems that some companies aren’t as up to speed as we had hoped. The only soap we could get in our supermarket delivery that seemed to come in a cardboard covering was Dettol Antibacterial Soap. This soap blotted its own copy book by having the double bars wrapped in plastic as well as cardboard, being a very strange shape and being so strongly lemon scented that our cats weren’t keen on us petting them for a little while after washing our hands.
Having tried this without success, we reverted back to the supermarket own-brand soap, which doesn’t create any more plastic waste, but also comes in at half the price. Whilst the standard soap bars from the supermarket were a little boring in both shape and colour and the faint generic floral scent wasn’t unattractive, but not entirely to our taste. However, when you step outside the supermarket’s basic soap range, things improve a little and so we tried Sainsbury’s The Collection Lemon Soap Bars.
These are more boring in appearance than the Dettol soap bars, although the yellow colour is a bit more interesting than the basic soap bars, if not as vivid as the yellow of the Dettol soap bars. They are slightly larger than the Dettol bars as well, measuring roughly an inch high, about 1 ½ inches wide and roughly 2 ½ inches long and they have a strong lemon scent, although it isn’t as overpowering as the Dettol bars. Fortunately, it also doesn’t last as long on our hands after washing, which means the cats, whilst still not entirely keen on the lemon scent, don’t avoid us for as long as they did with the Dettol bars.
What I was surprised by is that it does lather up quite well and whilst it perhaps doesn’t have the same cleaning power as liquid soaps, it does a passable job. I was also surprised that it’s much softer on my hands than some liquid soaps and after a while of use, it hasn’t dried my hands up in any significant way. And there is a lot of use in each bar, even more so when you buy them in a pack of 4 for just a couple of pounds, offering a significant saving over both liquid and luxury soaps for a much smaller drop in effectiveness than I was expecting.
Perhaps the only down side to this soap is that, just like in the old days, it reacts badly to being immersed in water and can break down in a soap dish and it also leaves a scummy residue around the sink after repeated use. Whilst this isn’t a problem with liquid soaps, some of the specialist soaps we have tried have done the same thing, for a higher price, so this isn’t a problem that occurs solely in cheaper soaps.
With Sainsbury’s The Collection Lemon Soap Bars, it turns out that you don’t necessarily get what you pay for. Sure, they’re visually less appealing than many soaps and the detritus they leave behind is less than ideal. But in terms of what you want them to do, in cleaning your hands without damaging them, they do almost as effective a job as other similar products for a greatly reduced price, so the value element comes into play in a major way.
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