שלום! Sorry, but I no longer have time to read or write for this site. I wo...
שלום! Sorry, but I no longer have time to read or write for this site. I won't cancel my account but I won't be active anymore.
Member since:21.06.2000
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Several years ago the company that made the laundry powder that we preferred made a change in their formula and suddenly my clothes weren’t getting as clean as I liked them to be. My husband found that Ariel powder was on special and decided to give it a go.
You should know at the onset, that I’m not exactly sure why, but I believe that we have available here a type of Ariel washing powder that you can’t get in the UK. Ours is called “Ariel Ultra Clean Plus” (hence the title of this op). According to our package, it is good for both white washes and coloured washes and can be used for hand washing as well. However, from the UK Ariel web-page (http://www.ariel-info.co.uk/en_UK/home/index.shtml) I see that you have available to you four different types of Ariel laundry products. The regular Ariel for general laundry, Ariel Colour which is specially formulated for coloured washes, Ariel Handwash which is meant to be used for delicate fabrics and Ariel Non-Bio.
I’d be willing to bet that if Ariel makes all of these products, then the quality can’t really be all that different. What I have certainly noticed over the years is that even when they have changed their formulas, the quality hasn’t been sacrificed in the process. It is because of the different types that you get and
and that I get that I'm not going to describe the packaging. Leave it to suffice that we once bought a special bucket for this (green plastic thing - kind of dumb looking, actually) and that we now buy the refill for this bucket in heavy plastic bags. Pretty convenient and you don't have a cardboard box to get damp and ruin the product.
Back when my husband first bought Ariel, we could only get the powder. This powder was made up of plain white granules. But the newer versions have blue and green coloured granules mixed in with the white ones. As the formula and colour of this product changed, I’ve also noticed that the scent of the powder has improved. At first it was just a strongly soapy scent - not bad, but certainly nothing to write home about. The newer versions seem to have improved the perfume that they add to the product since now there’s a much fresher scent to this powder - more akin to a pleasant softener than to a laundry powder. This doesn’t mean that you can forego using a softener altogether, but I have noticed that the softener we use seems to leave the scent on the clothes longer since the scent of the laundry powder has improved.
Moreover, I have used this product to wash delicate items by hand, and I’ve noticed that not only does it get these items clean, but the powder doesn’t seem to leave my hands feeling dry or chapped, and the items do smell very nice when they’re dry. Mind you, I don’t do lots of items by hand, but that’s mostly because I’ve had bad experiences with hand laundry soaps that left my hands feeling itchy and my clothes smelling only fair. With this powder I’ve come to think of doing an item by hand as only taking up my precious time and I no longer dread how my hands will feel or how my clothes will smell afterwards.
Now it could be that our washing machine is a good one, and I have done an op on that, but it seems to me that with time a washing machine won’t suddenly start making your clothes cleaner after a couple of years of use. So I can only believe that the new formula of Ariel laundry powder has assisted in getting certain old stains out of some of my clothes. Mind you, it hasn’t succeeded with all the really old and stubborn ones, but it certainly does a good job on most of them.
But we all know that whites are the real test, don’t we? Oh, how we dread finding a stain on something white, and if that stain is still there after its been through the wash, well, you might as well toss the thing. Well, I must say that if anyone has a person in their house who can test a laundry powder, its me - and that person is my adorable daughter. Being the youngest after two boys, she’s a bit of a tough nut, and she’s hardly the ladylike, quiet and soft-spoken darling that most mothers would hope for after two boys. But that’s what I adore about her - she’s no pushover. However, she’s also the one who comes home with the dirtiest clothes, and cannot go one meal without spilling or dripping something on herself - God love her! She’s my real laundry powder tester, and here’s an example of that.
Yesterday, my daughter proudly put on one of her white shirts that she had previously gotten ketchup on. I hear you say “oh, dear. Ketchup is one of the worst things to get out of clothes”. And mind you, we are not the type of people to rush to the sink with stain remover or throw items right into a bucket with soap every time my daughter soils her clothes. We’ve given up on that, since otherwise we’d be scrubbing her clothes 24 hours a day! So you can understand that this shirt sat in the laundry basket for a few days before it ended up in the machine. But even so, that shirt had no stains on it when my daughter put it on, and I had absolutely no feeling of embarrassment that she would look like a street urchin when she got to school. (Of course, by the end of the day she had adopted that look into her outfit!) There’s no question in my mind that the Ariel was the only thing that removed that stain.
I’m not much of a good judge when it comes to coloured washes, however. I’ve not noticed that anything has faded or started to look dull and lifeless since we started using this product, so I can only assume that this does a good job on coloured clothes. And with both coloured and white washes, I've never felt the need to use more powder than recommended, so I'd say that its about average in the economical area.
So, as you can see: I like the way this smells; its good for delicate clothes; it doesn’t irritate my skin if when I use it for a hand wash; it seems to be good for coloured clothes as well as whites, and; it gets stains out. What else could you ask for in a laundry powder? Well, I can’t think of anything except that the price isn’t always the cheapest on the market. Still, I think we’ve decided to stick with this one anyway (especially since my husband is great at finding it on special and stocking up). Bottom line: Recommended!
Thanks for cleanin… um… reading! (And since Ciao doesn’t pay you for these ops, I won’t be cleaning up with this one!)
~~~~~ Ariel is a product of Proctor & Gamble (www.pg.com). Their UK Web page can be found at http://www.ariel-info.co.uk/en_UK/home/index.shtml and they have an on-line contact form. Alternately you can contact Ariel by phone, between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday:
From the ASDA web page I see that these products sell in the UK as follows for the laundry powder only: Bio 3.3kg = £4.96 Bio 1.1kg = £2.36 Colour 1.1kg = £2.38 Colour 2.2kg = £3.98 Non-bio 2.2kg = £3.92 Non-bio 1.1kg = £2.38 Of course, other stores will have other prices. This is just an example. ~~~~~
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I always used Persil until Ariel was on special, and I actually quite like it now. Jane x
zoekin8yg 05.03.2004 11:43
I stick to the old persil
patriciat 20.02.2004 22:52
Why have they started confusing us with products for colours and whites. Much easier when there was just one which you shoved in for all eventualities. Pat.t
Oct 10th, 2002
very helpful by (97%):
helpful by (3%):
