Taking Palmolive® Soft Touch to Task

So there’s a little thing that happens when you travel – whether it be abroad on vacation or just back and forth like I do to Pittsburgh from DC – my home tends to get pretty messy.  Unpacking sometimes doesn’t quite get the chance to finish before the next trip. Sometimes I just don’t have the time to clean up, or I’ve been on the road so much I just want to take some time to be in ONE PLACE at a time.

But that messyness builds up, and sometimes you just have to go on a massive cleaning spree.

Fortunately, I recently joined Influenster and qualified for my first Voxbox!

The box itself was VERY pink and green.  And though it is one of my favorite color combinations (Hellooo Wicked fans out there!) the box kinda looked more like packaging for a late 90’s version of tampons or something.

They included several coupons, as well as two bottles of Palmolive SoftTouch to try.

They have three varieties.  All three are designed to clean your dishes while softening your hands.  The green bottle above is fortified with aloe to help with dry skin, while the pink bottle has vitamin E to maintain softer skin.  (Their third variety has coconut butter in it… SOOO wish I had gotten some of that kind! LOVE coconut butter!)

I decided to give the green, aloe infused kind a try.

The first thing I noticed was how thin the detergent seemed.  It was a bit more runny than I expected – when you think smooth skin you think lotion, and lotion tends to be creamy.  Not that I’d want creamy detergent, that would be gross.  But I just expected it to be a thicker consistency.

This lovely blob is what happens when you leave a cheese single on a plate in the microwave for 4 minutes.  Crispy and smells NASTY.  Don’t do it.  (And don’t leave your 6 year-old cousin alone long enough to do it either!)

It was good and stuck on there – to the point where scraping at it dry was doing NOTHING to remove the crispy blob.

I added about a teaspoon’s worth of soap on the plate while wetting it down.  If you look really close you can see the soap on the plate – a really pale spot of green.  Like I said, it was thinner than I thought it would be (and thinner than the typical bargain brand we buy.)

Once things got good and sudsy, the crusted cheese started to become much easier to remove.  And instead of smelling stinky cooked cheese, the sink began to fill with a fresh smell from the soap too!

Once things were cleaned up, the plate practically sparkled!

As for my hands?  Well, I typically only have a few dishes to clean, so I don’t use a dishpan or fill the sink with water and detergent, so my hands didn’t really come in much direct contact with the detergent.

So, to get a real test of the soap, I decided to wash my hands directly with it.

The results?  Well, my hands were clean.  And to be honest, they did feel a bit softer.

Only my left hand pictured here… because I had to use the other to actually take the picture.  Use your imagination here and pretend I have two hands. 🙂

My skin did feel a bit softer.  I could imagine once I’m down about half way through the bottle it would show some difference – or at least help maintain the softness of your hands instead of cause the dreaded ‘dish-pan hands’ that evoke solutions including ridiculous yellow latex gloves.

But I really think the soap would be more effective if it were more concentrated – thicker.  Because the only way the current product would really be effective is for a dish-washer with a large family who doesn’t have a dishwasher to do the job for them, who would need to submerge their hands frequently while spending more than 5 minutes scrubbing away.

Currently the detergent is $2.99 at Walmart, which isn’t a bad price.  For the value, I’d say it’s worth the buy as my hands did feel a bit softer.

~ Beth

I received these products complimentary from Influenster for testing purposes.