Nothing like a bit of house cleaning to make the mind wonder aimlessly like a Tory spin doctor at a race relations conference.
Mine was sufficiently empty to wonder whether there’s any substantive difference between bathroom and kitchen cleaner- apart from the colour of the bottle and a bit of extraneous perfume. Is there any real need for these differences, beyond the obvious one of getting us to buy two bottles of the stuff instead of one?
I took a quick look at my bottles of Mr.Muscle. (‘Loves the jobs you hate’, apparently. Does it really? I’d like to see how it gets on with marking a Himalayan size pile of sub-literate, illegible, stress-ridden exam scripts.)
The labels weren’t much help. Both contain ‘Less than 5% non-ionic surfactants’. This, helpfully or ominously depending on your point of view, is ‘Amongst Other Ingredients’- (Agent Orange? Plutonium?)
Non-ionic surfactants are presumably bad for human beings, fluffly animals and the environment (the big planet shaped one, that is, not the small house shaped one)-otherwise their presence wouldn’t be marked by a footnote saying ‘Less than 5%’ in tiny script on the back of the bottle.
There would be a great big star on the front with expensively designed lettering glorying in the improved product- ‘NOW WITH ADDED SURFACTANTS’.
The bit about which they seem obliged to inform us is EDTA- or ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid. I’m still none the wiser, although I prefer the colour of the bathroom bottle.
Still, if I was worried about something I spray all over my house containing it, I needn’t have been. Apparently the manufacturers of soft drinks include it to reduce the levels of carcinogenic benzene. Cheers!
January 31, 2007 at 3:05 pm
I’ve always wondered what non-inioic surfactants are. I am also constantly entertained by scare-mongering adds for household cleaning products. My favourite is the one where a zealous wife sprays Dettol on the phone receiver after her husband has sneezed on it. The message is that vicious chemical disinfectant protects your family.
I wonder how many more kids are admitted to casualty every year after accidentally ingesting Cif as compared to the number poisoned by household fluff.
January 31, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I mean, of course, ‘ads’ not ‘adds’.