I have never seen Vaska in a powdered formulation, just liquid only.
The Lavender fragrance is pretty light weight. By the time your clothes come out of the dryer there is just barely a hint of the fragrance left. The main smell of your clothes is just simply clean.
Vaska is fine for everyday laundry if you work in an office I guess. We used it in the past for bedsheets, etc. and it did a good job. But I don't know how it would do on clothing that has greasy stains on it. In that case I would pretreat the spots and hope for the best.

Because sshriv... has praised Vaska so highly in this forum, we risked buying two jugs of it (in Lavender scent) for our own use.

It's good. We have no complaints whatsoever.

When we have finished our second jug of Vaska (soon), will we order more, or will we go back to Biokleen All-temperature liquid? The latter. Biokleen All-temperature liquid is at least as good as Vaska; it is less expensive per load; it is made locally; and we will return to it as our go-to detergent.

I love, love, love Vaska "herbatergent," which I have used for several months now; but I made a big discovery and lesson yesterday: I thought the Vaska "perfect lavender professional grade" was the same but with a lavender scent. Wrong. The "perfect lavender professional grade" is much stronger and is to be dosed at 1/2 capful. Did I have suds coming out the kazoo or what? I will never buy the "professional grade" again. The "herbatergent" is just wonderful, not really "scent free," but close. I use Shout to get any stains out if needed and I am happy to forego the enzymes and brighteners in everything else. Love it, love it, love it. The softness is amazing, even without the Vaska softener.

Has anyone used Vaska that is allergic to detergents? I recently had to switch to All Free & Clear due to allergies caused by various detergents (contact dermatitis). I still have some Vaska left over and I was wondering is anyone with this kind of allergy has been able to safely use Vaska.

dualref, I cannot honestly say yet that Vaska is as effective as All Free Clear with my sensitivities. I will let you know this summer. I do know that I will always have a bottle of All Free Clear (NOT Small & Mighty and NOT oxi anything) on my shelf. I bought a big bottle yesterday for $7.?? at Target on sale.

While I'm here, dualref, I do want you to know that I've been showering with the Sundance Goat Milk soap and absolutely LOVE it. Thank you for that!!!!
Pat

Your skin feels much better, eh?
You are most certainly welcome.Glad to hear the good news.

rococogurl, I use Vaska and really like it, especially for darks and delicates (including wool and cashmere). I have the unscented version (it has a slight herbal scent but no added fragrance). It is great for sensitive skin.

Thanks for all the replies. I did get some and tried it last night on a small delicate load. I used half a cap and it created so much suds it almost covered the door. Wondering if it's more designed for top loaders? Will never use more than 1 tb in the future.

I used it regularly in my FL (the LG I had in my prior house) and had no issues with sudsing at all. My dosage was according to the instructions (a capful for a regular sized load of darks). Is your water very soft?

Thanks izeve. We have a whole-house softener but Tide HE is the only other detergent I've used that creates excessive sudsing. The 1/2 cap of Vaska could only be described as extreme. I'm always careful but next time I will cut back to a scant Tb. Just wanted to see if I had misunderstood the purchase or if someone else had experienced this. Things are so complicated today, it's easy to go wrong.

I think there were a few other posters here with whole house softeners that reported significant sudsing with Vaska (and some other detergents). Obviously reducing the dose would be worth trying, although I wonder if cutting it down to a tablespoon will be sufficient to actually clean a load of laundry.

Good point about the dosing izeve, especially when there are so many excellent alternatives that don't have the sudsing issue. End of that temptation.

I still love Vaska and it's what I use for most of my laundry. I do spot-treat stains with Vaska's pre-treat spray and it takes care of most things. If you have a really oily stain (like olive oil spilled on your shirt), you will have to ditch the Vaska pre-treater and use something a little stronger like Shout.

I also have a whole house water softener, but mine softens with potassium instead of sodium. I find Vaska suds up more when washing bath towels, but for normal loads I use the recommended dose on the cap and have no sudsing issues. I put myself on a detergent diet last year, but after a few months I started seeing little blobs of dark matter stuck to the outside of my tub. Since upping the quantities back to what I used before - very close to the manufacturer recommendation - my blobs disappeared. I also had a weird gray biofilm in my pin trap that has also since disappeared.

Up there ^^^ somewhere in this thread, you will see a posting that I wrote on April Fool's Day (but I was not fooling) of this year, where I wrote:

Because sshrivastava has praised Vaska so highly in this forum, we risked buying two jugs of it (in Lavender scent) for our own use.
It's good. We have no complaints whatsoever.
When we have finished our second jug of Vaska (soon), will we order more, or will we go back to Biokleen All-temperature liquid? The latter. Biokleen All-temperature liquid is at least as good as Vaska; it is less expensive per load; it is made locally; and we will return to it as our go-to detergent.

The passage of time makes fools of us all, I guess. We are very close to finishing off our second jug of Vaska. Today, I ordered three more jugs of Vaska (unavailable in local stores, and the quantity enabled us to get free shipping).

Why the change of heart?

Biokleen has changed its formula.

The Biokleen that we have been using for several years (we still have our last jug, still with a few drops in it, in our laundry room) says on its front label, "Effectively Cleans Colors and Whites with Grapefruit Seed and Orange Peel Extract." On one side of the bottle, the ingredients are listed as, "Surfactants and conditioners from coconut and/or corn, orange peel extract, grapefruit seed and pulp extract, linear sulfonate, filtered water." The writing on the other side of the bottle includes the following sentence:

"CONTAINS NO: Phosphate, chlorine, ammonia, petroleum solvents, alcohol, butyl, glycol ether, SLS or SLES, EDTA, DEA. No SARA Title III, CA 65, or EPA priority pollutants. No materials listed by the ACGIH as hazardous."

It was time to follow up on our prediction of April 1, and I was in the store to buy some Biokleen All-Temperature Laundry Detergent; I had the jug in my cart, in fact, when I noticed that the label artwork had changed, and so I looked at the ingredient list on the label. It now reads:

Water, Laureth 7 (Plant Based Surfactant), Cocamidopropyl Betaine (Plant Based Surfactant), Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (Plant Based Surfactant), Lauramine Oxide (Plant Based Surfactant), Glycerin (Vegetable), Sodium Chloride, Sodium Carboxymethyl Inulin (Plant Based Surfactant), Citrus Aurantium Dulcis (Orange) Peel Extract, Citrus Aurantium Dulcis (Orange) Oil, Citrus Grandis (Grapefruit) Seed Extract, C10-16 Alcohols (Plant Based)

Sodium Lauryl Sulfate is SLS; SLS is one of the ingredients that Biokleen was proudly touting it was free of ... before.

Now, I will state here and now, for the record, that I am not an SLS-phobe. There are some people who run screaming from the room, and seek out garlic, wooden heart-stakes, and silver daggers when SLS is whispered; I am not one of them. SLS is widely used in a very wide variety of perfectly safe household products, including shampoo and toothpaste. We have several SLS-containing products in our household and do not plan on replacing them anytime soon.

However, SLS is not only a known skin irritant; SLS is, in fact, the standard skin irritant against which other skin irritants are measured. Given the choice, I should prefer not to have SLS residues in my underwear spending all day resting against my skin, and I should prefer in the evening not to rest my cheek on a pillow slip that has been washed in SLS. Maybe that's just me, but those are my preferences, and I am staying with them until someone convinces me to change.

Am I certain that Vaska does not contain SLS? No, I am not. Vaska vaguely lists its ingredients as "plant based surfactants, vegetable conditioners." As noted above, the Biokleen label lists Sodium Lauryl Sulfate as "Plant Based Surfactant," the same phrase that Vaska uses on its label for unspecified ingredients.

However, the Vaska label states that Vaska is hypoallergenic, a claim that Biokleen does not make on its label, and I am dubious that an SLS-containing product could qualify as hypoallergenic. (I will leave it to the experts to chime in whether one could.)

So sshrivastava, you have won me over: we are Vaska users now.

Very interesting. I'm currently in NYC and have found Vaska products (detergent, bleach and softener) and was wondering whether I should buy and try some. It is pricey, though, and, seeing that its main cleaning ingredient are surfactants, I wonder how it would compare to something like Perwoll - which is readily available in every German store.

Alex