We’re going through a lot of soap in our house these days, and although the plastic soap bottles you can get from the store are pretty cute and have a wide array of good smells, they’re also pretty flimsy. They break, bend, or if you mix-and-match soap refills, they can get gunky or jammed.
Blueland is a company you may have seen on Shark Tank, advocating for fewer single-use bottles for household cleaning supplies. In addition to foaming hand soap, they also sell a wide variety of other minimal-waste household cleaning supplies like dishwasher tabs, laundry detergent tabs, glass cleaner, surface cleaner, and powdered dish soap.
Blueland delivers a clean, clear, heavy glass bottle with three tabs in different scents (Iris Agave, Perrine Lemon, Lavender Eucalyptus) when you order their hand soap starter kit. You fill the bottle to the fill line with hot tap water, drop in one of the tabs and let it dissolve (about 30 minutes), and the soap is ready to use.
The Iris Agave scent is bright and floral, the Perrine Lemon is warm and citrusy, and the Lavender Eucalyptus is strong and crisp and the scent stays consistent for the entire bottle of soap.
The pump on the bottle is sturdy and wide, easily operated by kiddos and adults alike. Two pumps generate a nice puff of foam that covers most adult hands, one pump is probably good enough for a child’s hands. After two solid weeks of multiple uses daily, my hands didn’t feel dry or worn out from this soap.
The foam reduces to a soapy liquid through a thorough hand washing – and the lemon scent tended to make less-than-stellar foam that faded out and required another pump of soap mid-wash to feel really “clean” (although this is a matter of personal preference!)
The starter kit is $16 for one bottle and 3 tabs. Additional tabs are $6 for 3 or $14 for 9, which brings the total investment for 12 “bottles” of soap to $30 or $2.50 per bottle, which is exactly in line with most plastic bottles of soap. That cost-per-bottle goes down over time as you purchase more tabs.
At the end of the day – is Blueland worth the investment?
In terms of removing messy refills or buying “yet another plastic bottle that will hit the recycling bin soon” from your life, yep, easily. There are (cheaper) alternatives out there: Gelo is one, their bottles are plastic but thick and made from recycled plastic – Gelo scents are stronger and the foam lasts through the entire hand wash. Gelo refills are not hard powder-based but liquid tabs. You could also just buy a nice glass or plastic soap dispenser and fill with a soap refill of your choice – that would likely be cheaper than Blueland.
With both in our bathroom, we can honestly say that both have their strengths and neither have led to dry hands even with the increased hand-washing due to COVID.
In terms of an across-the-board one-stop-shop cleaning set, Blueland offers a really nice mail-order solution and the bottles are both pretty and plain enough that they will match any bathroom decor.
Got a favorite cleaning product we just have to see? Or holding off on buying something and want to see cleaning experts test it out first? Let us know on Facebook or Instagram.
– Laura @ All Star Cleaning