We Tried Ajax, Bar Keepers Friend, Bon Ami, and Comet to Find the Best Powder Cleansers
CR also compared these four household cleaners to The Pink Stuff paste
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Saturday was the day to clean the house growing up, and it was my job to clean the bathrooms. At our house, we had a bottle of Fabuloso, which was usually enough for routine cleanings, but on days when the job required a little extra oomph, my mom requested I use a sprinkle of the heavy stuff—a powder cleanser in a blue metal tin, Ajax. I don’t usually keep a can of the cleanser or any other popular brands at home, but I still see a tin in my parent’s bathroom or under their kitchen sink.
- Powder Cleansers We Evaluated: Bon Ami Bar Keepers Friend Ajax Comet
- Ingredient Concerns
- Better Than The Pink Stuff?
- How We Evaluated
Powder cleansers contain physical abrasive ingredients that are supposed to help clean up stubborn messes like rust, burnt-on food, soap scum, mildew, and plenty of other things that need a little extra muscle to clean. The list of surfaces that can be cleaned with these products is lengthy, spanning nearly every room of the home and beyond. Keep in mind, though, that because of their abrasive nature, they can’t be used on every single thing in your home, and you’ll want to spot test a small area first.
How it cleaned: Like with all the powders, its effectiveness was very noticeable across all the surfaces we used it on, though most notably on a stainless steel kitchen sink. To get the best results with Bon Ami, I found that a second sprinkle, scrub, and rinse was necessary for really stuck-on messes, and the repeated work meant that it did not perform the best in our evaluations. Removing knife marks from my ceramic plates was also not that successful with just one scrub, but after a few scrub sessions, there was a big improvement.
Uses: The list of uses on the label is not as extensive as the other brands, but on the manufacturer’s website, there is a significantly longer one. In addition to the usual surfaces like kitchen sinks, cookware, and bathroom surfaces, a few other notable surfaces include outdoor furniture, porous surfaces like marble, and glass-top stoves.
Ingredients: It was the only powder to have all but one of its ingredients included in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Safer Chemical Ingredients List.
Bon Ami was also the powder cleanser preferred by Amy Ziff, founder of Made Safe, a partner organization that screens for harmful substances and certifies products that are safer for human health and the larger ecosystem. It has no fragrance or color additives, and unlike Bar Keepers Friend’s strange chemical smell, it had no scent at all.
Bon Ami Scratch-Free Powder Cleanser is also the only of the four powder cleansers whose packaging claimed users did not need to wear gloves for any cleaning with the product. One thing noted by CR chemist Eric Boring: This product contains feldspar powder, which, after long-term respiratory exposure, may cause a long-term lung disease called silicosis. “It’s unclear what the toxic effects would be in products where feldspar is present in small quantities,” he says. Regardless, taking precautions to avoid inhaling the product is important to avoid any secondary health effects.
How it cleaned: The competition was incredibly close, but in performance evaluations, Bar Keepers Friend Cleanser inched out the rest of the powders by a hair, removing knife marks from ceramic plates that the other evaluated powders did little to remedy. In fact, it was the only of the four cleansers that removed all the knife marks on a plate with just one round of scrubbing. Areas of my stainless steel sink scrubbed with this powder were noticeably shinier than areas scrubbed with the other powders. Ditto for my colleague’s baking sheet, which showed signs of improvement over areas the other cleansers didn’t do so well on.
Though it was a great performer, there were a few things I noted that weren’t my favorite. All the cans have seven holes at the top where the product is dispensed from, but the holes on the Bar Keepers Friend’s can are larger than the ones on the others, making it difficult to control the amount of powder dispensed.
Uses: Of the four powder cleansers evaluated, it had the lengthiest list of recommended uses. Boats, sporting equipment, and vinyl siding are a few of the more eye-catching surfaces on the list. I appreciated that all the information on the label was printed in both English and Spanish, something lacking in a lot of the cleaning products I use at home.
Ingredients: Its list of ingredients is not printed on the label, and the brand’s website very vaguely lists “surfactant” as one of the ingredients with no further information. This cleanser was the only one that produced a small cloud of powder in the air as it was dispensed from the aluminum can, and even though there were no added fragrances, the product’s smell brought back unpleasant memories for me of the Voban Aromatic Absorbent powder sprinkled over vomit at my elementary school. The brand mentions that gloves are recommended for prolonged use or for those who have sensitive skin but not for casual use of the powder.
How it cleaned: I expected both of the powder cleansers containing bleach to be the best performers in our evaluations, but this wasn’t the case. If we’re ranking them based on performance, both Ajax With Bleach and Comet With Bleach tied for third after Bon Ami and Bar Keepers Friend. The areas of my sink and baking sheet scrubbed with the powder looked significantly cleaner, but there was nothing special to boast about this powder.
Unfortunately, though it was an effective cleaner, Ajax has an unpleasant, mild bleach smell that becomes more noticeable the longer you clean with the powder. After rinsing the baking sheet I cleaned with the four powder cleansers, I noticed that the area of the sheet scrubbed with this product required an extra rinse to remove all the residue completely. If an unscented cleanser that rinses easily off surfaces cleans as well as (or better than) this smelly option, I’ll stick with the unscented kind.
Ingredients: Mixing any two cleaning products together is not recommended, but it’s especially important to remember when using the powder cleansers on our list that contain trichloroisocyanuric acid, the bleaching agent in Ajax and Comet’s powder cleansers. Boring says the ingredient isn’t dangerous by itself, but “is highly reactive with ammonia and can form toxic chlorine gas when mixed with strong acids.”
Two other ingredients listed on Ajax’s label are in the EPA’s Safer Chemical Ingredients List, sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate.
Uses: Ajax had the shortest list of recommended uses. It included pots, pans, porcelain, bathroom fixtures, ceramic tiles, barbecue grills, and garbage cans (though it did not specify what kind). The brand’s site did not have any specific information about any additional surfaces it could be used to clean, other than “other durable surfaces,” but it did list some surfaces it should not be used on, like silver, fabric, and painted surfaces.
How it cleaned: Performance-wise, Comet With Bleach did as well as Ajax With Bleach across all the surfaces we tried it on, and on the porcelain tub was as good as all the others. Like with the Ajax With Bleach cleanser, it took a little more time to completely rinse the powder off the surfaces I cleaned. When wet, my colleague’s baking sheet appeared to be totally free of powder, but after drying for several minutes, I noticed small patches of dried powder stuck to the parts of the sheet scrubbed with this cleaner too. I worried that I was leaving product behind on my ceramic plates so I ended up running all of them through the dishwasher after I completed my evaluations to avoid eating any powder residue when I used my plates.
Ingredients: Three of the five ingredients on the product’s label, calcium carbonate, pigment green 7, and sodium carbonate, are on the EPA’s Safer Chemical Ingredients List, but it was far from gentle. It was the only cleanser I immediately noticed an unpleasant bleach smell from—not just after prolonged use. Like the powder cleanser from Ajax, Comet’s list of ingredients includes trichloroisocyanuric acid, which should never be mixed with ammonia or other strong acids.
Uses: Comet With Bleach gets kudos for being the only other powder besides Bar Keepers Friend to have the label instructions in English and Spanish, but that’s where the callout ends. Every product we evaluated, including The Pink Stuff paste cleaner, had precautions on the label about the surfaces you shouldn’t use the products on, except for this one. There were no warnings against using on delicate surfaces or spot testing before cleaning a large area.
According to the label, it can be used to clean a multitude of surfaces in the kitchen and bathroom, including sinks, stoves, and toilet bowls.
Ingredient Concerns in Powder Cleansers
The ingredients in these products are not all created equal, with just one, Bon Ami, having all but one of the ingredients on the EPA’s Safe Chemical Ingredients List. None of the powders are EPA Safer Choice-Certified either. Ziff was wary of the vague ingredients listed on some of the other powders that stated “surfactant” or “fragrance” without providing users with any other information on exactly what those ingredients were. “Watch out for generic ‘fragrance,’ which can contain hundreds of undisclosed chemicals,” Ziff says. “I prefer to use a nonfragranced product as another way to eliminate unwanted chemicals in my home air.”
She also cautioned against using any of these abrasive cleansers without gloves, leaving them out of secure cabinets in between use, and inhaling any of the chemicals while cleaning. “As a general practice, I personally try to do the job with plain old baking soda,” she says. “For tough, caked-on goods an overnight soak in a baking soda paste can help.”
During evaluations, I made sure to keep the door in my windowless bathroom open and dispensed the powders far away from my face each time, but still, I began to feel a bit of discomfort in my eyes and throat after prolonged use. The sensation is not a pleasant one.
Do They Clean Better Than The Pink Stuff Paste Cleaner?
We’ve tried The Pink Stuff paste before in its own evaluation on burnt pots and as a grout cleaner. Both times it did well but didn’t wow our testers. When I tried it for myself for the first time to compare it with the powder cleansers, I found that it did about as well as the powders. It was difficult to tell which one did best because they all did exactly what they claimed to do—scrub out tough stains.
I found the paste form of The Pink Stuff easier to use than the powder cleansers, though. Often I had to add more water or dispense more powder to get the right consistency when I used the powder cleansers. There’s no guessing with The Pink Stuff paste. When I finished my evaluations, it was the product I reached for to try to give my colleague’s baking sheet one last, good scrub before I returned it. Rinsing the paste completely off the surfaces I cleaned with it took a little more time than the Bon Ami and Bar Keepers Friend powders, but I didn’t notice any residue after the surfaces dried, like I did with Ajax and Comet.
Its fruity, bubble gum scent was also really pleasant compared with the harsher scent of the Comet With Bleach powder and the unscentedness of Bar Keepers Friend Cleanser and Bon Ami Scratch-Free Powder Cleanser. I could see myself reaching for this paste before any of the other powders if I needed to clean a burnt-on kitchen item or my dye-stained tub again.
Where to Buy
Shop for The Pink Stuff at Amazon, Home Depot, Walmart
Photo: Jodhaira Rodriguez/Consumer Reports Photo: Jodhaira Rodriguez/Consumer Reports
How We Evaluated Powder Cleansers
To evaluate these powder cleansers, I borrowed a colleague’s 15-year-old baking sheet that needed some TLC, polished what I thought was an already clean stainless steel sink in my kitchen, scrubbed knife marks from my ceramic plates, and removed soap scum and hair dye stains from my porcelain bathtub.
For the baking sheet, sink, and tub, I cleaned a separate section of each surface with one product each. For the knife mark removal evaluation, I scrubbed one plate with each cleanser, then went back in with the best-performing powder to see if it could scuff out the scratches the others couldn’t.
All the products were applied directly to each surface and scrubbed with a Scotch-Brite Zero Scratch Scrub Sponge for 45 seconds before a rinse under warm water. I also took note of how easy the products were to use and whether the ingredients of each were on the EPA’s Safer Chemical Ingredients List.
