yes, it's a mid - long term effect.

Back in the seventies/eighties here in europe we had just regular powders with oxygen bleach and wool powdered detergents. The choice was between a too harsh detergent that faded dark colours and a too mild detergent that was uneffective with several stains.

Since 20 years we have regular detergents *whitout* oxygen bleach that wash colours whitout fading. Some detergents have even anti transfer agents to wash "mixed colours" and dark fabrics with no damage.

To have a clue my black jeans and coloured polo shirts back then faded a lot despite of warm washes, now they last for many years. Also : since round 10 years we routinely wash black, cherry red, green Ikea (so not the finest quality) towels @ 140°F with detergents for darks (as the likes of Perwoll Black Magic or Woolite for Darks) Black is still black, cherry red is still cherry red ... back those times it would have turned into grey and pink within six months

Also be aware that powders may leave some unsoluble residues on dark fabrics. Washer manufacturers (miele included) reccommend to wash dark fabrics with liquid detergents. They say powder contain zeolites ( roughly speaking, clay) that are unsoluble and leave little unpleasant white grains on laundry.

I feel those powders that use zeolites as water softener take ages to be rinsed properly and no matter laundry feels rather stiffer than if it were washed with liquids or other kinds of powders

It's not just the oxygen bleach, but regular Persil also contains *optical brighteners*.

In my experience, these are the ingredients that "fade" dark colored fabrics the most.

Persil recommends Persil Color Megaperls for "non-colorfast" fabrics, and Universal for pretty much everything else unless you have special needs for dark fabrics or gentle/hand wash.

Using the Universal powder on your colored clothes will cause them to fade. I just browsed the archives of our consumer magazine: they have some interesting pictures in their articles that deal with detergent. Underwear that turned from blue to red and socks that went from blue to brown after only 20 washes with Universal-type detergent. I attached one of these documents as an example. It's in German, however. The conclusion of this test was that Aldi and Lidl detergent washed just as well as Persil. The test is from 2005, though! Newer test rate Persil Universal-Megaperls and Ariel as the best-performing detergents for whites. Persil-Universal Gel did much worse.

Alex

Here is a link that might be useful: Test of 2005 - see page 2 for pictures

As a matter of fact, I ran the most recent test through the Google translator and it did really well!

http://translate.google.de/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.test.de%2Fthemen%2Fhaus-garten%2Ftest%2FVollwaschmittel-Pulver-sind-besser-1765670-1762576%2F&sl=de&tl=en