Nobody has to tell you what is in it
Food lists its ingredients. Cosmetics list theirs. The detergent you wash your plates and your bedsheets in does not have to.
national laws in Australia or the US requiring a cleaning product to publish a full ingredient list
of the ingredients these products emit appear on any label or safety data sheet
the year two cleaning industry trade groups sued a US state to block ingredient disclosure. They won.
This is not an oversight. It is the gap the category was built in.
Detergents are full of ingredients that clean nothing
The ingredients we would not put in food, we put on the plates we eat food off.
Optical brighteners
Fluorescent dyes designed to stay on the fabric after rinsing. They absorb UV light and throw it back as blue, so white reads whiter to your eye. Nothing is removed. The stain is still there.1
Fragrance
One word standing in for a mixture that can run to dozens of compounds. Many are volatile, so they lift off the fabric into the air you breathe. No law here makes the brand name a single one.2
PFAS
Built around a carbon-fluorine bond, the strongest in organic chemistry. That's why they repel water and grease, and why nothing takes them apart. "Forever chemicals" isn't a nickname, it's a description.3