The Body Wash Conundrum

 I've been thinking a lot more lately about a lot of the liquids I buy.  In particular, the things like liquid soap, body wash, etc. where you're basically buying a product that's mostly water.  There's also the issue of how much energy is used to ship just containers of mostly water from place to place, which is obviously not great.  More and more companies hav started addressing this issue, and I've been doing some experimenting to see what's on offer.

For a several years, I've been using Dr. Bronner's castile soap as my body wash.  This stuff is great in that it's super concentrated, and if I buy a gallon jug, lasts me more than two years.  The downside is that I still have to buy a gallon jug of liquid; the only place I can get that size is Amazon, which I'm trying to use less, and then it has to be shipped to my house.  So, it's certainly better than buying a non-concentrated body wash, but I found a couple other options recently.

Blueland: 

Blueland is a company that has been doing the 'ship you a concentrated product and you add water to it' thing for quite a while.  I've tried most of what they offer, and really liked some of it.  Their dishwasher tablets and foaming soap tablets are great; their clothes detergent not so much.  But because my experience with their products has been more good than bad, I wanted to try their new dehydrated body wash gel.  This ships as a powder in a compostable package, and then you put it into the bottle they send and add water to the fill line.  Shake it up, and within ten minutes, you have a body wash gel. The container looks like it's about 1/2 liter (it doesn't say on it, or on their site), so it's standard body wash container size.

Positives-- The container is a good size, squeezes easily and has an excellent close on the top--not something I usually notice, but this one doesn't have a flimsy lid that gets all gunked up or seems like it will break off.

Negatives--They don't currently had an unscented version, so I had to pick the least offensive scent on the list, but the good thing is that it's not very strongly scented (sandalwood).  It also doesn't foam well at all, which means that I use a ton of it.  I've been using this bottle for a very short time, and it's almost empty. This is also the most expensive option of the two. As of this writing, the starter set, which includes a refillable bottle and one pouch of powder costs $16. The refill is $9.

Overall-- I probably won't buy this again, but I like the bottle and will certainly refill it with something else.

Dove:

I had an ibotta rebate for this product, and I'm really glad I did!  This turned out to be my favorite of the two, even though I also don't love the scent of this one (thankfully, also not too, too strong).* For this product, you buy a starter kit similar to the Blueland, but you mix a concentrated liquid with water.  This container is a refillable metal pump, that is less utilitarian and more design-y than the Blueland, but it's also smaller, which is a plus.

Positives--This stuff is concentrated!  Even after you add water to it, I only need one small pump to load my pouf up with suds and give my whole body a very satisfying scrub.  I've had this stuff for much longer than the Blueland, and the container is still half full, so I'm getting way more bang for my buck. The starter set, which includes the 16oz metal pump bottle is $10-$15 dollars (different designs have different prices for some reason, but they're the same size) The refills are all really reasonably priced--$6.99 apiece on Target.com.

Negatives--The small refill concentrate is teeny (4oz), but it's still a plastic container that probably can't be recycled.  It's not ideal, but I don't think I'll need to buy them very often since it's so concentrated.

Probably the better solution to reduce waste would be to use a bar of soap in a compostable wrapper, but I don't like doing that, so body wash it is.  For now, I'm going to use up my remaining Dr. Bronners, and then stick with Dove refills for the foreseeable future.

*My migraines are really triggered/exacerbated by strong smells--I wish companies would realize that and dial down the scent on products like soap/body wash.