Where our own products lose, and why we publish it anyway

Dishwasher tablets. Blueland’s starter set takes the category, and Vove’s tablets come second 1 2. The carton matches Blueland on the ingredient list and on the absence of any dissolving film, and the gap sits in two rows. The formula carried a silicone anti-foam that sat on the watch list until 26/08/2026, when the entry narrowed to the ECHA-restricted cyclic species and declared PDMS stopped matching, a change the methodology dates and whose beneficiary it names; what still separates the tablet from the carton above it. PEG 8000, the binder, sat beside it on that list until 25/08/2026, when the watch-list entry for PEG and ethoxylated compounds was retired. The packaging carries a single FSC mark against Blueland’s wider stack of EPA Safer Choice, Cradle to Cradle, Leaping Bunny, Climate Neutral and B Corp, and a refill tin most of that field cannot match 2.

Laundry detergent. The same two brands and no longer the same row. Blueland takes it and Vove’s tablets are second, but the ingredients row is not what separates them any more: both Vove products here carried the same PEG 8000 binder until the watch-list entry for PEG and ethoxylated compounds was retired on 25/08/2026, and their lists now read clean at both tiers 3 4. What is left is the pack, a kraft carton against a refillable tin, and Blueland’s certification stack, again the heaviest in the table.

Toilet tablets. The Unscented Company takes this one, with Blueland second, and Vove’s tablets fall further here than anywhere else, to third. Until 26/08/2026 they sat near the bottom of that table, because the formula carried a Lime and Eucalyptus fragrance with no allergen and no component named behind it, an upper-tier entry on the watch list and the most serious thing that list carries. That is the loop this page describes working on the page that describes it: the gap was printed here, the product page was republished on 26/08/2026 naming limonene and eucalyptol behind the scent, the read was repeated and the entry moved down the watch list to the lower tier 5 6. A disclosed fragrance is a lower-tier entry rather than no entry at all, so the ingredient list still does not read as clean as the two above it, the cost row goes to cheaper cleans, and the packaging carries the same single FSC mark as the dishwasher tablet. The table is still somebody else’s.

Dish soap. Cleancult’s refill takes it and Vove’s starter set is second, the closest call of any loss on this page 7 8. The gap sits on the watch list, not on packaging or price. Vove’s ingredient list names its scent as disclosed essential oils, and a disclosed fragrance sits in the lower tier of the watch list rather than reading clean, which is the one thing separating the two rows.

The three konjac sponge tables, body, baby and face, are new wins rather than old losses. Vove’s sponges carry FSC packaging, a Vegan mark, EU Organic and USDA Organic certification, packed in an FSC card box, and the ingredient list reads clean against the watch list in all three, nothing flagged in either tier 16 17 18. The Konjac Sponge Company’s entries are certified too, but not on the same stack, and Vove’s wider set of marks is the stronger one on certifications in every one of the three tables.

Where a criterion cannot be settled from published evidence the cell says so, and the product is taken out of the ranking and out of every verdict. It is the harshest rule here, because a product read on fewer criteria than the rest is not being compared with them at all, and leaving it in the order would flatter whichever brand published least.

It has already taken a Vove product out of dish soap. The Dish Soap Bars page names no wrapper material and gives no bar weight or wash count, so packaging and cost per use could not be settled at all. The bars carry no position 9, listed after the ranked products on the same terms as every other page that did not say what its product is made of.

Four structural things let those losses onto the page without an argument in the office.

• The criteria were fixed and published before any category was researched: ingredient transparency, ingredients of concern, PVA and microplastics, cost per use, packaging and certifications. The same ones apply in every category, and a criterion added or dropped to rescue one result would change every table on the site with it.
• Every criterion is desk-verifiable. A price, a pack count, an ingredient list read against the published watch list, a packaging description and a certification mark are all read off public pages on the dates given in the sources, so a reader who disputes a row can open the source behind it and tell us where the reading goes wrong.
• A product carrying a criterion we cannot settle leaves the ranking, and the rule has cost us products rather than an argument 9.
• There is no performance criterion. No laboratory test has been run, so cleaning is not judged anywhere on this site for anybody. That is the criterion a brand-owned comparison would most like to hold, because it looks authoritative and can be awarded quietly to oneself. It is not on the list.

The ingredients-of-concern row is new, and it is the one doing most of the work above. It reads every published ingredient or materials list against a fixed two-tier watch list, undisclosed fragrance, isothiazolinones, chlorine bleach, borates and phosphates in the upper tier, disclosed fragrance allergens, sodium lauryl sulfate, dyes, silicones and unnamed plastic in the lower one. The list was fixed and published before a single product on this site was read against it, and it is printed in full on the methodology page. A brand that dislikes where it lands on that list is reading a rule that was written before its formula was.

One entry has come off that list since. PEG and ethoxylated compounds sat in the lower tier as a blanket flag, which marked a stripped, verified grade the same way it marked an uncontrolled one; the EPA Safer Choice ingredient list carries PEG 8000 and several alcohol ethoxylates as verified low-concern, and a solid high-molecular-weight binder is not the species the concern was written about 15. The entry was retired on 25/08/2026 under method v1.2.1, for every product in every table on the same day, with the reasoning written into the published watch list file itself. It moved other brands up and it moved Vove up, which is the next section’s problem rather than a footnote to this one.

The exclusion rule runs both ways, and in some of the wins listed at the top it runs ours. Vove’s Sponge Scourers are first in scrub sponges on the thinnest case of any win on the site, and they are first because they were the only product there with every criterion settled 10. A loofah sponge from Full Circle reads better on the criteria its page could settle and carries no position, because the page describes no packaging 11. Bottle brushes read the same way: Vove is the only brush in that table whose page describes its own packaging, so it is the only one ranked at all. In dryer balls, Vove is first while a wool set from Smart Sheep reads better on what its page does publish and carries no position, for the same reason 12 13.

So some of the wins here are wins over a field the method thinned rather than a field Vove beat outright. The rule behind that is defensible, because a product read on fewer criteria is not being compared with one read on all of them, and it is still a rule that handed Vove a first place without Vove having to beat the product reading better above it. Dish brushes, bottle brushes on the row that matters most, hand soap and the stain remover and booster table are different: there the runner-up published enough to be ranked and still finished behind Vove.

Food storage is a win of the thinned-field kind and no better one. Vove’s compostable bag sets take that table mainly by being the pages that filled in packaging where several genuine rivals did not, and Vove’s own ingredients row is the weakest in the winning entry: the single bag page names its materials as PLA and PBAT and no more, so it does not read as fully transparent 14.

This is the part a reader cannot check from outside, so it is worth stating flatly. A Vove product moves up this site when Vove publishes something it has not published, or when it reformulates away from a watch-list entry, or when it goes through an audited certification programme. It can also move when a rule changes, and on 25/08/2026 it did: retiring the watch-list entry for PEG and ethoxylated compounds cleared the ingredients row for both Vove laundry tablets without a gram of the formula moving. The defence of that is not that the move was small. It is that the entry came off for every product in every table on the same day, the reasoning went into the published watch list before any table was rebuilt, the version number moved to v1.2.1 with it, and the same change took the toilet tablet pick away from one brand and handed it to another, neither of them ours. If the rules change again, the version number changes with it and every table is read again on the new rules at once.

The first of those three routes has since been walked, and it is the cleanest illustration of the loop this piece is about. Our toilet tablet sat at the bottom of the ingredients row because its fragrance line named a smell and no substance, and the toilet tablet page said so in the finding, in the verdict and in the cons. On 26/08/2026 the product page was republished with limonene and eucalyptol named behind the scent, the read was repeated, and the fragrance entry moved down the watch list from the upper tier to the lower one, which moved the tablet up that table 5. Reading cost per use off the cheapest pack, adopted the same day under method v1.3, moved it up again. The substances were on the product’s Safety Data Sheet the whole time, so this was a disclosure gap and not a reformulation, and the page that found the gap and the company that closed it are the same company. That is the arrangement working as intended and it is also the arrangement at its most self-serving, which is why the change is dated in the log, the earlier reading is printed beside the new one, and the row it moved is still not the top of that table.

The dishwasher and laundry rows are formulation and packaging problems, not copy problems, and the honest thing to say about them is that they do not fix on a rewrite. The certification stack cannot be bought quickly or cheaply, the laundry carton would have to become a refill format to take the packaging row, and a paper refill tin or an audited standard would have to replace the single FSC mark for certifications to move. None of it is a caption fix.

The toilet tablet was closer to one, and it has since been fixed that way. This page said that naming the fragrance components behind the Lime and Eucalyptus line, the way Cleancult names Limonene, Citral and Linalool in its own hand soap list elsewhere in these tables, would lift that criterion off the bottom without changing what is in the bottle. On 26/08/2026 the components went onto the product page, limonene and eucalyptol, both already declared on the Safety Data Sheet, and the criterion read better on the next pass 5. Nothing in the bottle changed, which is the point and also the limit of it: a copy fix moves a disclosure and moves nothing else. The dish soap starter set is the closest gap left on the page: reformulating to an unscented line, or naming the individual components behind the essential oil blend the way Cleancult’s own list does, would close the one gap that keeps it behind Cleancult. The Dish Soap Bars gap is smaller still. The wrapper material and the bar weight are known inside the business and are not on the product page 9. Two published facts put a product back into a ranking.

The certification rows are the honest exception, and they are most of the reason the two biggest detergent losses above cannot be written away at all. A certification is an audit somebody else runs against somebody else’s criteria: EPA Safer Choice has a standard, an application and a review of every ingredient in the formula 15. Vove’s dishwasher tablet, laundry tablet and toilet tablet each carry one packaging mark and nothing that certifies the formula itself. Either Vove goes through a programme of that kind, or the row keeps reading the way it reads, and a table owned by Vove keeps saying so.

None of this earns the site any trust on its own account, and it is not offered as a virtue. It is offered as things a sceptical reader can check: the criteria and the watch list are published, every figure is dated and linked to the page it came from, the order is ours and argued for rather than derived, and where the owner loses a row the row says which one and why.