I’m a statistician. In 2023, I retired from my job in healthcare analytics. My wife was still working full-time so I started doing more of the household chores, including the laundry.

When I read the ingredients on the detergent we were using, I wondered what all those chemicals were. I started Googling, and I didn’t like what I found out. For example, one of the ingredients was Sodium lauryl sulfate. Sulfates are generally made by reacting petroleum with sulfuric acid. The resulting product isn’t terrible, although it can irritate your skin. But why would we use petroleum to make what is basically soap?

I started looking for substitutes, and experimenting. I soon decided that what I really needed was just plain old soap. I remembered when I was a kid, my mom used Ivory Snow to wash delicates. But I couldn’t find that in the stores. (I found out that in 1993 Proctor & Gamble quietly altered the formula for Ivory Snow, changing it from soap to detergent.)

I also found a lot of “greenwashing” in the industry. One extremely popular “natural” laundry powder, with “soap” right there in its name, doesn’t contain any soap at all!

Since I couldn’t buy the product I wanted, I decided I would have to make it myself. I thought that if I wanted it, then maybe others would want it, too. So PureClean Essentials was born!