There's no shortage of "ingredients to avoid" lists on the internet. Most of them are designed to scare you into buying something. This article takes a different approach. We'll walk through five ingredients that commonly show up in cleaning products, explain what they actually do, where the real concerns are (and aren't), and share how we think about them as formulators who've been making this stuff since 2012.
Synthetic Fragrances and Phthalates
Synthetic fragrance systems are in the majority of conventional cleaning products. The word "fragrance" on a label can represent dozens of individual chemicals, and companies aren't required to disclose them individually. That's not a conspiracy — it's a regulatory gap. Fragrance formulas are treated as trade secrets, so "fragrance" can mean almost anything.
Phthalates are one of the ingredients that sometimes show up inside those fragrance blends, particularly when long-lasting scent is a design goal. Some phthalates have been studied for their potential to interact with hormone signaling, with most of the research focused on repeated exposure over time.
Here's where we land on this: we don't use synthetic fragrances in any of our products. All of our scented products use essential oils — real plant oils, fully disclosed. This was a deliberate decision we made early on, and it comes with a tradeoff we're upfront about. Essential oil scents don't last as long as synthetic ones. Our air fresheners smell great for a while, then fade. They're not designed to camp out in your living room for three days. If you want a scent that lingers indefinitely, that requires fragrance chemistry we're not willing to use.
We actually learned how significant that difference is by accident. One of our team members sprayed a synthetic air freshener in our office — five pumps of something they'd bought at a hotel gift shop in Mexico. The chemical perfume smell stuck in the bathroom for five days. A few people worked from home until it cleared. That's the kind of persistence you get from synthetic fragrance systems, and it's exactly why we avoid them.
SLS and SLES
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate and Sodium Laureth Sulfate are the most common surfactants in conventional cleaning products. They're cheap, effective, and they produce impressive foam — which is the main reason they've dominated the category for decades.
The concern with SLS is straightforward: it's a known skin irritant, especially with repeated exposure. If you wash your hands a dozen times a day or spend twenty minutes at the sink doing dishes, the surfactant system matters. SLES is generally milder on skin, but it can contain trace amounts of 1,4-dioxane as a manufacturing byproduct, depending on the supplier's process and purification standards.
We formulate without both. Our dish soaps and hand soaps use blends of plant-derived surfactants instead. The performance is there — our concentrated formulas cut grease and clean effectively — but the surfactant blend is designed to be gentler on skin at the exposure levels that actually happen in a real kitchen. One of the most common pieces of feedback we get from customers who switch to our dish soaps is that their hands stopped cracking and drying out. That's usually the SLS they were using before.
Ammonia
Ammonia is a legitimately effective cleaning ingredient. It cuts grease, evaporates cleanly, and leaves almost no residue, which is why it's been the go-to for glass and mirror cleaners for a long time. We're not going to pretend it doesn't work, because it does.
The issue is the exposure. Ammonia is irritating to eyes, skin, and respiratory passages, especially in enclosed spaces like a bathroom with the door closed. Most of the risk isn't from a single use — it's from repeated exposure in poorly ventilated areas, or from the genuinely dangerous mistake of mixing it with bleach (which produces chloramine gas).
For everyday surface cleaning and glass cleaning, you don't need it. Plant-derived surfactant formulations can handle routine kitchen and bathroom surfaces without the fumes. If you're cleaning something specific where ammonia has a genuine advantage — old grease on oven surfaces, for instance — ventilation and gloves make it manageable. But for the daily stuff? There are better options that don't require opening a window first.
Chlorine Bleach
Bleach is the most effective widely available household disinfectant. That's just a fact. If you need to kill pathogens on a surface — during a stomach bug, after handling raw chicken, in a bathroom that needs actual disinfection — diluted bleach does the job reliably and cheaply.
The problem is that most people use bleach for jobs that don't require disinfection. Wiping down a kitchen counter after making lunch doesn't call for bleach. Cleaning a bathroom mirror doesn't call for bleach. Mopping a floor your kids play on doesn't call for bleach. The dose and context matter enormously, and the tendency to reach for "the strong stuff" for everyday cleaning leads to unnecessary chemical exposure — fumes, skin irritation, and the ever-present risk of someone mixing it with the wrong product under the sink.
Our approach: we make cleaning products for everyday use. Daily countertops, dishes, hands, surfaces, air. For those jobs, plant-derived formulations handle the cleaning without the exposure concerns. We don't make disinfectants, and we're honest about that. If you have a situation that genuinely calls for disinfection, bleach works. But for the other 95% of your cleaning routine, you don't need it.
Triclosan
Triclosan was the poster child of "antibacterial" marketing for years. It showed up in hand soaps, dish soaps, toothpaste, and cutting boards. The FDA restricted its use in consumer hand washes in 2016, which tells you something about how well the marketing outpaced the evidence.
The core finding was simple: for routine handwashing, triclosan offered no measurable benefit over regular soap and water. Soap doesn't "kill" bacteria — it dislodges them and lets water carry them away. That mechanical process works the same whether the soap contains an antibacterial agent or not. Meanwhile, triclosan raised concerns about antimicrobial resistance and environmental persistence in waterways.
We've never used triclosan. Our hand soaps use plant-derived surfactants that do exactly what soap is supposed to do — break down the oils and dirt on your hands so bacteria and viruses rinse away. No antibacterial gimmick needed. The science on handwashing has been clear for a long time: technique and duration matter far more than whatever additive the marketing department decided to put in the bottle.
How We Think About All of This
We're a cleaning products company. We formulate, manufacture, and package everything in-house from a single facility in California. We've been doing this since 2012, and we've looked at every one of these ingredients closely — not from a "what's trending to avoid" perspective, but from a formulation perspective. What works, what's necessary, what's there for marketing, and what's there because it actually improves the product.
Our general principle is straightforward: every ingredient in a formula should have a functional reason to be there. If it doesn't improve cleaning performance, stability, or the user experience, it doesn't belong. That's how we ended up without synthetic fragrances, without sulfates, without triclosan, and without a lot of the other ingredients that populate conventional cleaning products. Not because a blog post told us to avoid them, but because we couldn't justify including them once we looked at the tradeoffs honestly.
If you want to see the full picture of how we make these decisions, our Our Story & Standards page lays it out in detail.
The Practical Takeaway
You don't need to memorize an ingredient blacklist or panic about what's under your sink. Most cleaning products are used safely every day. But understanding what a few common ingredients actually do — and whether they're necessary for the job you're using them for — puts you in a better position to make decisions that fit your household.
The best question isn't "is this ingredient bad?" It's "does this product need this ingredient to do its job?" If the answer is no, and there's a well-formulated alternative that skips it, that's a reasonable choice. Not a moral one. A practical one.
