If you read my last Tangie review, you know I’m a huge fan of their shampoo bar (though not their conditioner bar unfortunately). Well in that first order from WasteFreeProducts.com (this is the site of the people who make Tangie products), I also got two Hand Soap Paste Bars. I loved those so much (and used it up straight away) that I ordered three more hand soap bars. And I thought it was about time I reviewed them. Then I got the Laundry Stain Remover Bar from my friend for Christmas (thanks Lynne!) and thought I would review that today too.
Hand Soap Paste Bar
So let me start off by saying this works best for those who like foaming hand soap and have foaming hand soap dispensers. My husband is a fan of foaming soap and I find that it’s great for my daughter too, so I purchased automatic foaming soap dispensers from SimpleHuman (which are sadly no longer being sold). For the longest time I was buying gallon-sized foaming soap refill solution from Whole Foods, but I hated all the plastic I was discarding/recycling. I tried using Bronner Soap but that didn’t quite work (it never really foamed). So I was super happy to find that Tangie’s Hand Soap Paste worked super well with my foaming hand soap dispensers. The Hand Soap Paste comes as a bar (in a recyclable paper box, or with the awesome option to go package free), which you then cut up into smaller pieces and dissolve in water (and that becomes your solution). I kept my last Whole Foods gallon-sized plastic refill bottle and have been using that to dissolved the hand soap paste. One bar makes 12 cups of foaming soap solution, which is equivalent to almost 2 refills of the gallon-sized plastic bottle. Oh and I cut my bar into six cubes, and you add 2 cups of water per cube (so for each refill I dilute 3 cubes into 6 cups of water). It does take about a day for the cubes to fully dissolve so I would make it ahead of time, as soon as you run out of the refill solution.
The Hand Soap Paste makes a foaming solution that it is slightly thinner than other commercial liquid foaming solution, but it still gets the job done. Plus there’s less than 10 ingredients in the Hand Soap Paste (July 2022 update: the new ingredient list is Coconut oil, olive oil pomace, jojoba oil, almond oil, glycerin, aloe vera, rosemary oleoresin) compared to the almost 20 ingredients in Whole Foods foaming hand soap solution (Water, Decyl Glucoside, Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate, Sodium Cocoamphoacetate, Benzyl Alcohol, Sodium Citrate, Terasodium Glutamate Diacetate, Citric Acid, Salicyclic Acid, Glycerin, Sorbic Acid, Hydrolyzed Jojoba Esters, Panthenol, Tocopherol, Organic Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice, Organic Arctium Lappa (Burdock) Root Extract, Organic Chamomilla Recutita (Matricaria) Flower Extract)—and notice that first ingredient is just water. I appreciate the natural ingredients and the overall less chemicals in the Hand Soap Paste Bar because sometimes my daughter isn’t as diligent about washing all the soap off her hands as I’d like her to be, and even if she ended up ingesting some I know that as least she isn’t ingesting a ton of chemicals.
And best of all I feel great knowing that I’ve prevented 6 gallon-sized plastic jugs from going to recycling (ok I know that’s not a huge deal and it’s a drop in the bucket, but hey it all adds up). Price-wise I would say it comes out to about the same (though the WF refill is a bit cheaper). The Whole foods refills cost about $10 each, and the bars are about $20 (and it can refill almost two jugs-worth). But in general, this is a habit change that was easy to do and I’m happy about buying just a bit less plastic every year for my hand soap refills.
The Laundry Stain Remover Bar
The last stain remover I purchased was this Oxyclean gel stick from Amazon. And even though it works well enough, I’ve had some issues with it staining my white clothes blue (because the gel is a blue color). And well, that defeats the point of a stain remover if it ends up staining my clothes another color. And not to mention the egregious use of plastic that can’t be recycled. So I was really happy when a friend gifted me the Tangie Laundry Stain Remover bar. It’s super easy to use (just wet the bar soap and rub it on the stain), and it gets the job done. Best of all, no blue residues and no use of plastic. Consider me converted!
So these are my two latest (and very easy) zero-waste wins. If you’re interested in trying out any of Tangie’s products, including these two, you can use the code FAIRLYCURATED at checkout to get 20% off your first order (and full disclosure, I am supposed to get a small commission for sales using my code, but haven’t seen anything from them yet—their affiliate program seems to be a bit disorganized, but I really do believe in their products and don’t care so much about the cents I may or may not earn from them).