It doesn't make life Easy at all! (Easy Oxigen Washing Up Liquid)

Member Name: i_am_joy

Product:	Easy Oxigen Washing Up Liquid
Date:	30/04/09 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cleans non-dirty plates and dishes fairly well, smells nice

Disadvantages: Leaves a soapy residue, doesn't cope with grease or baked on mess, false economy

Last week I sent my granddaughter to the shop to buy me a bottle of Fairy washing up liquid, she knows I like to try economy brands bless her and instead came back with a 750ml bottle of Easy washing up liquid in the Oxygen variety as it cost half the price. Well, at ten years old she isn't to know that Fairy is the only washing up liquid for me so I set about using it - after all, it could be the best thing since sliced bread although I doubted it.

This is a fairly attractive washing up liquid; it is a bright aqua colour with a fresh ocean-like scent and the bottle doesn't look particularly cheap so perhaps she had done the right thing after all.

It might look and smell nice but to be honest as a washing up liquid this is worse than useless. I am the sort of person who washes up as I go along because I hate a sink full of dishes so any mess on my plates or cutlery is fresh and hasn't had time to set in. In particular I am thinking of the scrambled eggs I like to have for supper most nights as this is probably the toughest job my washing up liquid has to cope with, I make my scrambled eggs in a saucepan and you know what a nightmare it is to get clean again. Well, this Easy washing up liquid really struggled despite the fact that I had soaked my pan in hot water for a good half hour beforehand.

Likewise when it came to washing my roasting pan, in this instance it didn't so much struggle as just refused to perform full stop. Using my pan scrubber I was able to get the big black lumps off the bottom of the pan but Easy just doesn't cut through the grease to give it a proper clean at all. To compare this to my usual Fairy, I can squirt a little Fairy into the hot soaking water and by the time I am ready to wash the pan most of the grease has been lifted off and is floating on the water ready to be carefully flushed down the plug hole. A very quick rub with the scrubber and a hot rinse will then remove all greasy residue.

With Easy it took me a good hour to clean my roasting pan and even then I was not really convinced that it was clean and it still retained that horrible tacky feeling that kitchen utensils get when they haven't been washed properly.

It's a decent enough liquid for washing plates and cutlery that just need a cursory clean but as I do a lot of cooking with fresh ingredients I need something a little more helpful than this.

Another thing worth mentioning is the fact that I have to use quite a lot of this washing up liquid in each bowl of washing and this makes it a real pain to rinse. Even after rinsing well with cold water I could still occasionally taste the residue of the liquid on my plates and this is not good at all, in particular I found my baking tray was very hard to rinse and when I cooked with it afterwards I could smell the washing up liquid on the tray as the oven heated up which resulted in me throwing away the food that I was cooking.

At just 59p for a 750ml bottle this might seem cheap, and indeed if you just want a liquid to clean minor mess then this might be OK for you but in all honesty it's just more trouble than it's worth for me. Anyway I find it a false economy as this larger bottle was used up within ten days whereas a 500ml bottle of Fairy will last me for at least three weeks before it needs replacing.

Summary: Now THIS is why I always stick with Fairy!