Seventh Generation laundry detergent review: Thumbs way down

I recently tried Seventh Generation Natural Liquid Laundry Detergent Free & Clear and found that it was only slightly better than using no detergent at all.

I had read a recommendation for Seventh Generation laundry detergent in a magazine and thought I’d give it a try. Maybe I didn’t buy the the correct version of the liquid laundry detergent and perhaps some of them work well, but the one I bought for $10 at a grocery store just doesn’t clean the clothes at all.

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I’m not crazy about writing negative reviews, but I’d also hate for someone else to go through my experience. Two of my daughters’ shirts may have been ruined due to this detergent. One had hot chocolate stains on it, and the other had tomato sauce stains.

I have a fair amount of experience with stain removal and was confident that these stains would come out since I’d pretreated them with OxiClean spray. One shirt went through the dryer before I realized the stain hadn’t budged. I caught the other shirt before it went through the dryer and found that its stain also hadn’t even faded – it looked the same as before laundering it.

I sprayed the shirts again with OxiClean and rewashed them in the Seventh Generation laundry detergent, and the stains still didn’t come out. I was also noticing that my laundry in general didn’t look as clean as it should.

So, I bought some Arm & Hammer Plus OxiClean liquid detergent, pretreated the shirts for a third time and washed them in the new detergent. On the shirt that hadn’t been through the dryer, the stain disappeared by about 90 percent. On the other shirt, it was about 50 percent gone.

After another pretreating and washing in the Arm & Hammer detergent, one shirt was okay to wear again, but the other still shows some of the stain. I’m hoping that the shirt won’t be worn out from all the washing before I manage to get the stain out.

I had used Arm & Hammer Plus OxyClean liquid laundry detergent before, and it’s one I’d recommend trying.

The stained shirts are both very nice and fairly new. I generally don’t get upset over food stains since they almost always come out after pretreating with Oxiclean spray or a solution of Tide Oxi mixed with water.

With the Seventh Generation laundry detergent, stains didn’t come out, regardless of whether they’d been pretreated, and laundry in general didn’t come out looking clean.

I have reviewed a number of different detergents over the past few years and published a recipe for making your own laundry detergent. Even the cheapest laundry detergents I’ve tried and the home brew laundry detergent performed significantly better than this Seventh Generation laundry detergent.

Walmart’s house brand of laundry detergent (White Cloud) didn’t do a great job, but it wasn’t terrible, either.

I use a standard top-loading clothes washer and add bleach to white loads. On the plus side, fabrics did smell fresh after washing with Seventh Generation laundry detergent. As I mentioned before, other versions of Seventh Generation laundry detergent might work just fine, but my experience with the Seventh Generation Natural Free & Clear Laundry Detergent has been a big bummer.

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