Clean Shopping

When it comes to purchasing cleaners for our home, most of us pick those up when we are grocery shopping or picking up things at our favorite big box store. It’s just something we casually remember we need and toss in our carts.

There are also many of us who shop for cleaners online using services such as Amazon Prime, Amazon Pantry or even Grove.com. These services, while not always cost-wise, do offer an outstanding convenience that can even include auto shipment so things magically arrive just as you need them.

I love online shopping and find that more and more I find ways to shop online for groceries, staples and cleaners. The advent of shopping for groceries online and pulling up to have them neatly loaded in your car without going inside is like the best invention ever in my book! I do however also enjoy shopping for quick repeated things like cleaners online because it saves time and I can get exactly what I want quickly.

When it comes to shopping online for cleaners however, how do you know you’re getting the best natural product for your money? How do you know what you can trust will work and be worth a repeat purchase? Where do you go to find these items?

The Quest for Natural Products Online and In Stores

While I now make most of my cleaners, there are just some things that make sense right now for me to purchase. For instance, I’d love to make my own laundry detergent and there are lots of positive economical reasons and natural ways to do so, it is just much more convenient for me to purchase a natural detergent. Right now this approach fits my needs and budget.

When I have shopped Amazon, Grove.com and other sites that claim to offer natural cleaning products I can certainly find variety but like the big box stores and grocery stores the devil is in the details – or in this case the labels. It is very easy to be tricked into thinking something is “organic” or “natural.”

As consumers have started to demand less chemicals, more companies are updating their labels to use words like “simple”, “pure”, and even “natural” but in reality these products do not fall into the pure and natural category all. They may be a marked improvement from traditional products when it comes to being more safe, natural and environmentally friendly but most are still heavily relying on chemical fragrances which make them toxic and risky to use for you and the environment.

The Meyer’s brand is an excellent example. This brand of products has long touted a natural, simple ingredient list on their products. They also clearly say they do not animal test and ingredients consist of things like essential oils and other natural based good for you ingredients. They have simple cute packaging and labeling that give the impression this is a special product that is indeed “natural.”

I loved many of Meyer’s products including their dish soap, fabric softener and surface cleaning spray but come to find out, the fragrance ingredients in these products – chemicals! While many of the ingredients are in fact natural, the scents included are not pure or natural at all. Sadly these products don’t have pure essential oils and are filled instead with adulterated and manufactured essential oils to create those scents.

When you use a cheap, inferior, impure, adulterated or manufactured essential oil for scent you are not getting the benefits of using essential oils. You are just creating a scent similar to how traditional cleaners with their lemony fresh smell do it. The bad news is it can be just as harmful or worse for your safety when you use a product that contains these types of fake essential oils. In many cases you are also paying more for a “natural” product so you’re wasting your money too.