Mild Green Fairy Liquid?

I was brought up with Fairy, and as soon as I was inducted into dishwashing, I received strict instructions from my mother. “Never squeeze the bottle!” she admonished, “you only need one drop of ‘Fairy'”.

Old habits die hard, and I have to admit, I still never squeeze the bottle, even though I think the liquid has become diluted over the years as it doesn’t come out in drops, but a thin dribble. Despite that, my brand loyalty to the ‘Fairy’ queen of suds was fierce,  and these hands that do dishes desisted cheaper pretenders to the throne.

Now lets fast forward to the latest season of this soap opera… what has driven me to start blogging is an alarming statement on my latest bottle of softness: ‘Harmful to aquatic life with long lasting effects.’ What? How can this be? My Fairy, my mild Fairy, is now a bio-hazard contributing to the death of dolphins? Well I can’t have that.

I don’t suppose the formula has changed much over the decades, but the way we label it certainly has. There was a time we all fell out with these convenient cleaning concoctions of our parents in favour of others whose names were prefixed by ‘Eco-…’ as we became green eco-warriors. I can’t put my finger on when or why the Fairy slipped back into the shopping trolly, perhaps that was it, it was just so much easier to pick it up in the local ‘one stop’ supermarket than to order it from a specialist supplier.

But now it is not acceptable to be poisoning our ecosystems from the kitchen sink, so we must find alternatives. What do you use to do dishes?