I Tried it: Dish Soap as a Bathtub Cleaner

As stated in the section about me (Nissa) I just moved into an apartment built in the 1920s, so it comes with this really great clawfoot tub. I love it, but I was so scared to clean it with any harsh chemicals, lest I burn a hole right through it! So I did a little research, and found that a lot of people with porceline finished tubs use plain old dish soap to gently, but effectively clean their antique bathtubs. I was a bit sceptical at first, and you can't believe everything you read on the internet. Why would anyone even buy a separate, and super harsh bathroom cleaner when they had perfectly good (and cheap!) dish soap in the kitchen? But, it did seem gentle enough, and what's the worst that could happen? It doesn't get my tub perfectly clean and I'll have to try something else?

Their arguments were sound enough:

1. Dish soap is made to break up grease and food build up. (Read oils and proteins, which are the scum part of soap scum)

2. No harmful chemicals/fumes= no skin irritation or need to open the window in the middle of the Boston Winter to ventilate.

3. It's very inexpensive

4. It multitasks, meaning I only have to keep one small bottle around for both dish washing, and cleaning the tub, instead of two bottles. (Hey, that matters with 400 square feet of space!)

5. I trust it to be powerful enough to clean the dishes off of which I EAT, so why would it not make my tub clean enough for me to stand in it while I shower?

So, I tried it.

Here is my tub with two weeks worth of dirt, scum from bar soap and bathrings from my olive oil enriched salt scrub.

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And here it is after I hit it with some Palmolive antibacterial dish washing liquid:

It worked like a dream! No smell, no tough scrubbing(just the normal amount of scrubbing involved) , no peeling hands, no bleach spots on my clothes! It was just fantastic! I'll never go back! I was so happy with the results of my tub, I cleaned my sink too!

Just a word of caution: I'm sort of enamored with my gleaming bathroom now. I like to stop in every hour or so, just to look at it. Maybe you're not as weird as I am, but you have been warned.