After having seen the commercial on television for Dawn Direct Foam, the one with the little goldfish in the bowl talking about how Dawn Direct Foam can help save water, my son, knowing I occasionally wrote product reviews, asked me if I would do a product review for Dawn Direct Foam.
“Why?” I asked him.
“Because I want to see how it makes liquid come out of the pump thing like foam, and I didn’t think you’d buy it just so I could play with it,” he said.
Okay, he’s probably right, but since he was so interested in doing a product review with me, I decided to go to the store and buy three bottles of Dawn Direct Foam and run the product through its paces and see if it lived up to its claims. So we bought one of each scent of Dawn Direct Foam: Fresh Rapids, Citrus Kick, and Lime Surge. I’ll bet you can guess what colors Citrus Kick and Lime Surge were, and Fresh Rapids was blue.
The first claim Dawn Direct Foam made was right on the bottle, indicating that there were over 250 pumps per bottle. So my son grabbed a chair and me on one side of the sink and him on the other, we each took a bottle of Dawn Direct Foam and started squirting and counting. Both bottles actually pumped over 250 squirts each, so their first claim is absolutely true.
Yet, I wondered in looking at the size of each squirt (about the size of a quarter) just how far 250 pumps would actually stretch. So the third bottle we purchased was used exclusively for washing our family dishes. That bottle lasted almost two full months, and I have to say, compared to the regular gel like liquid dishwashing soap I usually use, that is about twice as long as I’m used to the dishwashing soap lasting. So that was another way Dawn Direct Foam passed the test.
So let’s look at the other claims Dawn Direct Foam makes on its website:
Dawn® Direct Foam™ is the first dish cleaner to:
* use a breakthrough, foaming technology
* absorb 10X more grease than regular dish cleaners
* use less water
(Retrieved February 11, 2007, from: www.dawndirectfoam.com)
Okay, for the first claim, I can’t really say what ‘breakthrough’ is, but I will admit that the product does trickle out of the pump in a small, about quarter sized amount of foam. However, when you use that foam on a sponge and add a little water and squeeze the sponge a few times, the suds are abundant and do last quite a long time.
I did learn in the two months of using the product that I had to change how I thought about washing dishes, though. Using liquid dishwashing soap, I would typically fill the sink and squirt some liquid soap in the warm water, splash it around to make suds, and then add a bit to the sponge and wash the dishes, adding more to the sponge when needed.
With Dawn Direct Foam, the water in the sink did not suds up when I squirted the foam into the sink like I did with the liquid soap. However, the suds on the sponge were thick and full and could be added to the water by squeezing the sponge under water, but it really wasn’t necessary, because I could generally do an entire dinner’s worth of dishes for a family of four with only two squirts of foam from the Dawn Direct Foam product. The foam and suds stayed on the sponge even after repeated submersion into the sink. I was impressed.
The second claim Dawn Direct Foam makes it that it absorbs 10X more grease. Well, I really don’t have a way to measure if that’s a true claim either, but my personal opinion is that my sink was easier to clean after washing dishes, grease did seem easier to clean, and my fingers and hands were not greasy while washing greasy pans, so it appears this claim is true too.
The last claim is that Dawn Direct Foam uses less water. I don’t know how this is measured, but in my personal opinion, this claim is actually NOT true. I felt I was using more water to rinse the clinging suds completely from the dishes than I did with liquid soap. Granted, the dishes were easier to clean and less greasy, but the foaming suds did cling to the dishes quite well.
The only complaint I might have about Dawn Direct Foam really is more of just an observation than anything – Dawn Direct Foam works better with sponges than it does with scrubbers and brushes. However, because it works so well, you may find you don’t need to scrub as much.
All in all, I really like Dawn Direct Foam and even though it seems more expensive on the shelf than regular liquid soap, considering how well it cleaned and how long it lasted, I will definitely be purchasing this product again. The smaller bottle makes it easier to use and store on the shelf or the sink too. Of course, if you want to save a bit more on Dawn Direct Foam, you can purchase the refill bottle and refill the pump dispenser yourself.
The only problem I truly had with the Dawn Direct Foam product turned out not to be a problem at all. At first, I thought the foam pump leaked. Since I leave my dishwashing detergent sitting on the soap indentation on the sink, I could see a soapy, white filmed line running from the product down the side of the sink. I was rather upset to notice this since Dawn Direct Foam had performed so well in every other area, but I soon discovered I was wrong!
Actually, the bottle does not leak at all – my son, however, likes to walk by the sink and slap the pump to make the foam squirt out of it every time he walks by the Dawn Direct Foam dispenser.
