The Best Baby Wash and Shampoo

how we tested

Thank goodness for the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and GoodGuide, two organizations that study, research, and rate baby soaps. Both have specific criteria, although different, for rating the safety of products, and both have a specific category for baby wash/shampoo.

There are between four and seven soap ingredients that should raise parents’ eyebrows. The EWG flags four: fragrance, parabens, PEGs, and ingredients ending in “–eths,” according to Leiba of the EWG.

The GoodGuide’s Chief Scientist, Bill Pease says, “we don’t generally advise consumers to try to shop in a way that avoids specific chemicals, because there are so many chemicals in most products, and many pose some level of low or moderate human health risk. We advise shopping with broader selection criteria—see the website’s The Best Baby Shampoo Products—where we rate shampoos using a score that integrates health, environmental and social concerns.”

Still others list more ingredients to avoid, including the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a coalition of public health, educational, and consumer groups, working to eliminate chemicals linked to cancer in personal care products. It says consumers should read labels and avoid products containing about seven listed products that have very long names. You can see its full list here. While, Dr.Greene.com, pediatrician, author of Raising Baby Green, and father of four, lists five ingredients to avoid in baby shampoo: fragrance (parfum), Sodium lauryl and laureth sulfate (SLES) and (SLS), parabens, triclosan, and methylisothiazolinone.

If you’re the type of parent that won’t sleep at night unless you’ve read, first-hand all that you can about products, then we’ve got some bedtime reading for you. Here’s a list of some of the most talked about chemicals in baby shampoos, as gathered from the CSC: Fragrance,  Formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing preservatives (FRPs), Parabens, Phthalates, and 1,4-dioxane (sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS)

But do soaps without chemicals clean was well as others? GoodGuide’s Pease reminded us to, “give up the notion of finding a “chemical-free soap,” adding “There really aren’t any cleaning products ‘without chemicals.’” He said, “Some ‘natural’ products may contain only plant-based compounds (like citric acid), but these are all chemicals, and they can have adverse health effects (e.g. essential oils can be skin sensitizers or allergens).”

Armed with all this safety information, I looked for products with excellent ratings on both the EWG’s Skin Deep Guide to Cosmetics and GoodGuide’s database, and from there, selected candidates for further testing.

I ranked them based on the EWG and GoodGuide databases and put the top six baby soaps through a series of tests to ensure the best one came out on top. First was a handwashing test with the six soaps. My 5-year-old daughter and I washed our hands with each product, one at a time, and made notes about lather, feel, scent, and packaging (ex. is the bottle hard to open?). From this test, we crossed off two products from the list because of feel (one made our hands feel sticky), or an unpleasant smell. (See “The Competition” below.) That left four for a real-world test: a bath!

For that, I got both of my kids good and dirty (while camping), and gave them baths each night for three nights, using a different shampoo product each night. In this series of tests, I used the same product on each child (and on my own hair that night), and made notes for: lather, scent, and if the kids complained about it stinging their eyes. I also noted the consistency, and how much shampoo was needed to properly clean the hair and body, to keep value in mind.

I also looked at how the soaps lathered. This is another area that took considerable research. Most liquid soaps contain sodium lauryl sulfate in order to lather. “GoodGuide (and other consumer advisory services) consider SLS to be of “relatively low concern in terms of human health risk,” Pease says. The main reason it’s a risk is that it is “suspected of causing skin irritation.” Since all babies have delicate skin, we wanted a shampoo that can lather without the use of this chemical.

This next criterion may be a hard one to swallow, or sniff. We determined that the product should be fragrance-free, or use a completely natural scent like lavender oil. Fragrance isn’t necessary to clean a baby. It’s just for the parents! Phthalates, which are known to disrupt the reproductive system in animals, are common components of fragrances. “The fragrance industry can use about 3,000 ingredients in their mixture. So you don’t know how many of those ingredients are in your shampoo. Some of the ingredients are phthalates and things we are definitely concerned about” says Leiba. And GoodGuide says to, “look for products from companies that state their products do not contain phthalates.“

Although cost is an important factor in the decision-making process, we feel a safe product is worth paying a few extra dollars per bottle. Sure, we don’t want to pay $15 or $25 for one bottle of baby wash, but some really great products do cost more.

Before we came to the conclusion about price, I researched how often babies really need to be bathed. Sites like Parenting.com, BabyCenter.com, to AskDrSears.com agree that babies should not be bathed daily. The Mayo Clinic, even suggests that newborns don’t need any soap. The common ground for the amount of time a baby needs a bath is two to three times a week, tops. When you consider how much soap you actually need to use, especially if you use a washcloth or sponge that retains more soap than just washing with your hands, the amount of soap used in a week is only a few teaspoons. That 8 oz. bottle should last a while.