Safeguard is sold in packs of 6 bars with a label saying, save 37 pesos.
Everyone I know buys it.
On Saturdays, friends head to Cash and Carry and buy a multitude to stock up. They pile it up in their bathrooms behind their towels so that when someone runs out of soap – as is inevitable in a house with children – they’ve got a bar to hand out.
So spoiler alert – not a fan.
Just too many chemicals in there for me to be excited.
For Safeguard Pure White, the Philippine formulation is: Sodium Palmate, Tapioca Starach, Water, Sodium Palm Kernelate, Glycerin, Fragrance, Talc, Palm Kernel Acid, Sodium Chloride, Titanium Dioxide, Zinc Pyrithione, Tetrsodium Etidronate, Zinc Sulfate, Disodium Distyrylbiphenyl Disulfonate, Pentaerythrityl Tetra-Di-T-Butyl Hydroxyhydrocinnamate, Citric Acid.
That’s the formulation for the Philippine market, and I am not sure if the formulation is the same for other markets. P&G has often developed local variants of popular brands.
When I type Safeguard in the EWG database, I come up with three anti-bac bar soaps. None, I think, are the equivalent of the Philippine Safeguard Pure White bar, and when I look at the ingredients, they differ.
These different formulations make it difficult for a consumer.
You can’t just pull up a score from EWG to assess a product, and it is tough for non-profits to grab information and create an assessment. Neither can you rely on a local formulation to remain stable – it changes over time as well.
So how do you assess a product?
- The less ingredients the better
- Go for products that are not made up of compound products such as soap bases or perfume, which are often made up of multiple ingredients themselves.
- Go for products where you are familiar with the ingredients.
These are really quick, really simple rules for assessing a product but they are by no means foolproof. It just that with an estimated 79,788 chemicals in daily life, it is almost impossible to know an avoid them all.
We rely on governments and businesses to keep us safe, but often with conflicting interests involved and weak regulation, it is pretty tough for consumer health to be at the forefront of product creation.
Footnotes:
- A Chemical World. (2014) [online] Available at http://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/Chemicals-Us ed-in-Daily-Life [Accessed 06 August 2017].
Soap, Suds and Stuff 