I AM WASHING MY COUCH BLANKET

Does your couch blanket need a bath, too? Plus, Cif Cream, new Dawn scents, and the 411 on detergent sheets

Real talk: I've had "wash the couch blanket" on my to-do list since August. 

While the couch blanket spins away in my washer, I figured I'd write to tell you that I'm washing the couch blanket in the event you have "wash the couch blanket" or any other such similar non-essential chore on your to-do list that you really ought to just bang out so that it's over with — consider this a JFDI-style nudge.

(Do you guys remember JFDI? JFDI isn't my creation, but a lot of people associate it with me because I wrote about it at The Hairpin or the Jezebel or one of those other ole gals. JFDI stands for Just Fucking Do It, and it is a very helpful self-motivation tool for when you're yutzing around instead of taking care of the (usually very easy) thing that's been languishing on your to-do list since August.)

Now that I've nudged — and oh please, won't you tell me in the comments what chores are languishing on your to-do list because I find it fascinating what other people put off! — I promised you guys I'd talk about Cif Cream and I also have a few other products I've received recently that I think you'll be interested in. So! 

💖An Ode to Cif Cream💖

When I was a young Clean Person, Soft Scrub was a staple of household cleaning. I've mostly abandoned it in my adulthood because I found it to be a redundant cleaning agent — I had a bottle under the bathroom sink in the OG Lillypad and I rarely reached for it. Sorry old friend!

But I never lost my love of cream cleansers, so when I ended up with a bottle of Cif All Purpose Cream Cleanser that came with a set of Scrub Daddy and Scrub Mommy sponges I was testing for work, I was more than happy to try it out and oh my God, you guys, the way I fell in love with this stuff.

I will level, here! Cif Cream is in no way better than any other cleaning agents formulated for use on hard, nonporous surfaces. If you already have an all-purpose or specialty cleaner you love for cleaning kitchen or bathroom surfaces, you do not need to go buy Cif Cream. You just don't! The reason I love Cif Cream so much is that this stuff smells incredibly good. That's really pretty much it! Oh, and also I do like that it's thinner and less viscous than Soft Scrub, because it sort of squirts out of the bottle in a way that's just a lot of fun. I enjoy the flinginess of the Cif Cream, I think is the best way to explain it.

This is the Cif Cream I have that smells so good but there are other scents and I feel compelled to try them all

While Cif Cream has loads of uses, I use it pretty much exclusively for cleaning my kitchen sink. I already have cleaning agents I like for the bathroom, and for my other kitchen surfaces (with the exception of the glass cooktop, because she is a streaky, temperamental bitch), so while I could use the Cif elsewhere around my home, I relegate her primarily to kitchen sink duty. I like to squirt-fling the Cif all over the sink and then let it sit for 10 or so minutes so that the smell can waft around before I go in with a sponge or microfiber cloth.

🎄🎃Some New Dawn PowerWash Scents!🎃🎄

I know there are some devoted Dawn PowerWash users who walk among us, and so when Dawn's PR emailed me about three new seasonal scents I was like, "Oh yes, send them to me, the people will want to know." This, in spite of the fact that I already have a stash of PowerWash, not to mention a few bottles of non-Dawn stragglers, large enough to last me a lifetime. I need to divest some Dawn, is the thing.

The new scents, along with my tasting notes, are:

Fresh Pine

Now listen, I may hate Christmas, but I love-love-love a pine moment. Scents are subjective, of course, so if pine isn't generally your jam, don't go out and buy this dish soap on my say-so. But if you are a fellow lover of pine, Dawn's pine scent is an A++ pine.

Frosted Cranberry

As a native New Englander, I also have a tremendous fondness for cranberries, and I do tend to like a cranberry-scented item. Dawn's Frosted Cranberry, however, is a bit of an odd duck as far as cranberry scents go — it's not bad, but there's a middle note I can't quite identify that's throwing the experience off for me.

Pumpkin Spice

It pains me to admit this, as a great lover of Hallowe'en (my late mother used to refer to it as the High Holiday, which still makes me laugh when I think about it), but I don't much care for pumpkin spice scents. Actually, if I'm being really honest they make me want to retch. I'd put pumpkin spice notes slightly below the stench of truffle on the Jolie Kerr Scent Aversion Scale. WITH THAT SAID. If you do like pumpkin spice scents, and I suspect a great many of you do, this is a pretty good one! It is definitely spicy. I got a lot of cinnamon and nutmeg from this soap, is what I'm trying to tell you.

Unfortunately, in the course of writing this I spotted Dawn's Pomegranate Rose Water scent on their website and now I must have it :/

🧺🧼Welcome to the World of Detergent Sheets🧼🧺

Detergent sheets are a new-ish format in the laundry products space, and we really need to devote an entire newsletter to them because this audience, I've noticed, counts reducing waste among its core values. Because of that, I've been extra on the lookout for products that work well and that also help to reduce packaging or water waste that I can point you to. 

So with a promise that I'll go deeper on the subject — I've got a review of Arm & Hammer's laundry detergent sheets waiting to be published (spoiler: They're pretty great!) — here's an overview of detergent sheets. Detergent sheets are liquid-free (we love low- or no-water formulas!), come packaged in cardboard boxes that are akin to the packaging used for dryer sheets (we love plastic-free packaging that also has a small footprint for easy storage!), and use a dissolvable and biodegradable resin to suspend the soil-, stain- and odor-eliminating ingrediences that give laundry detergents their cleaning power (we love biodegradable things that know when it’s time to leave the party!)

The format is now being used for other types of household cleaners; I just got a shipment from Cleancult that included a box of Toilet Bowl Sheets, which I dutifully tried out when I cleaned my bathroom on Sunday. They work just fine! And actually, the sheet produced an impressive amount of suds, which was fun and which made it feel like the toilet bowl cleaner was really doing its thing. (Cleancult also sent me a box of their detergent sheets in a new Juniper-Sandalwood scent which I will give away because juniper and sandalwood scents are up there on the Jolie Kerr Scent Aversion Scale. Woof.)

Laundry detergent is the primary way you'll see this new sheet format being used, but I'm poking around to see if there are other examples. Have you seen any cleaning sheets that you want me to know about? Please do not gatekeep!

The big thing to say about laundry detergent sheets is that some of them are quite good and most of them are very bad. I'll go into all of that once the A&H laundry sheets review is published and I can get more into the weeds, but the short version is that if you want to try this type of product, stick with Arm & Hammer for the time being because they seem to have gotten the format as close to right as I've seen. This is very definitely a new delivery system that needs a lot of tweaking, but I'll remind you guys of this fact: When I first started writing Ask a Clean Person, Tide's now-ubiquitous laundry detergent pods hadn't even come to market. So even though the detergent sheets of today aren't perfect, I feel strongly that they're worth keeping an eye on because my sense is that by 2026 or 2027, they'll be everywhere and we can be all, "Pfft. This is hardly news to us!"