There is detergents for clothes washing, general cleaning, dish washing, hand washing, 'shampoos', body wash, car wash, and whatever the industry can come up with to sell more.

 

How much of it is marketing, what forbids to use dish washer products for clothes washing, or shampoo for washing hands - between extremes; as obviously one ihas to be better 'tuned' to one application than another.

 

In the fifties, shampoo barely existed, nor dishwashing machine fluids, and less the 'bodywash' they came up with.

Do their surfactants differ that much ?

 

Is there an optimal proportion of water to say -clothes detergent- that works best, or using more will clean more ? There is a trend to use double or more -than-suggested per laundry load. I believe that will only increase the perfume content of the washed clothes, but not the 'cleanliness' . Is that the way it works ?

Laundry soaps are designed to produce very little suds (don't try using shampoo in your washing machine unless you want to spend the day mopping up the mess). Body soaps often have additives to promote healthy skin. Dish soaps are designed to cut cooking greases. Shampoos have ingredients to make your hair better/shinier/healthier/fuller.

 

Some of it is hype and marketing, no doubt, but if you've ever tried to go without shampoo and just use bar soap for your whole body, you've probably found that it can add too much oil to your hair and makes it heavy and limp. Similarly, if you used dishwashing soap on your hair, it would probably dry it out and make it brittle.

 

Most modern soaps are synthetic detergents that do well no matter the calcium content of your local water source. Older soaps use animal fats and wood ash. Btw, if you get some animal fat and wood ash on your hands, a good modern synthetic detergent will probably work better at cleaning it off than old-fashioned soap would. Yeah. Irony.