By Zach Pozniak, VP of Operations at Jeeves of Belgravia New York and fourth-generation dry cleaner · @jeeves_ny
Last reviewed August 2026 · scored on my 2025 board of 78 lab-tested detergents, with the seven-country Ariel comparison run in 2026 · As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Quick verdict: Ariel 2X powder ↗ scored 102.4, the highest number I have ever put on my board, and it costs about 7 cents a load. Nothing I have tested cleans better, and nothing that cleans anywhere near this well is this cheap. The catch is real: 68 fragrance ingredients and a 6 out of 10 for ingredient safety. If you have sensitive skin, do not use it. If you do not, this is the most stain removal per dollar in laundry.
| Performance | 102.4, first place out of the 78 detergents I tested in 2025 and the highest score on the board |
|---|---|
| Cost per load | About 7 cents. I paid 5 dollars for a 4.4 pound bag. The market average sits around 20 cents |
| Ingredient safety | 6 out of 10. Nothing alarming in the base formula, but 68 fragrance ingredients and a lot of skin sensitizers |
| Packaging | 4 out of 10. A messy plastic bag that needs in-store drop-off recycling |
| Form | Powder. Heavy, messy, awkward to carry to a laundromat, not portable |
| Free and clear version | None. This is the single change that would make it a universal recommendation |
| My verdict | "In case it wasn't clear, I do recommend this product." Buy it for price and performance, not for gentleness. See it on Amazon ↗ |
My detergent board is not a five-star scale and it is not out of 100 in the way most ratings are. It is anchored at both ends. Plain water scores 1, because water alone does remove a little of a stain. Tide Hygienic Power Pods score 100, because when I built the board they were the best thing I had ever tested, and every other product is measured against them. As I put it during the 2025 award show: "This board is built around Tide Hygienic Pods score."
So a 102.4 is not "an A grade". It means Ariel 2X powder removed more stain than the product the entire scale is calibrated on. It is the only detergent that has done that, which is why it took the gold medal for 2025 and why the number sits above 100 at all.
It also means the number is a stain-removal measurement and nothing else. It says nothing about how the product smells, what it costs, what is in it, or whether it suits your skin. I say this every time and it matters more here than anywhere: "This is purely performance. This is not my recommendations."
I am a fourth-generation dry cleaner, and I run detergents through the AISE industry-standard laundry detergent testing guidelines, the same protocol the big testing labs use. Cotton swatches are stained with 18 different stains across five categories (oily, particulate, enzymatic, oxidizable, and special), including artificial body oil, which is the most common stain on your clothes and the one most reviewers ignore entirely. The swatches dry, then get washed.
The measurement is the part that matters. I read the exact colour of every stain with a spectrometer before and after the wash, compute the colour difference, convert that to a percentage removed, and average it across cold, warm and hot water. I do not do subjective testing, aka use my eyes, as I consider them unreliable. I also re-run a plain-water control every few weeks to confirm the board has not drifted.
This is the most common question I get about this product, and it is a fair one. Search around and you will find Ariel 2X called everything from a miracle to a dud. Here is what actually drives that spread, with examples from my own bench.
This is the big one, and I proved it on myself. When I first tested the German Ariel powder I followed the instructions on the package, which called for around 140 millilitres. My reaction at the time: "wow, if they're recommending 140 millilitres, I think I gotta use more than a couple tablespoons here." The result came out somewhere in the 130s. Then I caught myself, brought the dose back down to the standard amount I use for every product on the board, and the same powder scored 72.7.
Same detergent. Same machine. Same swatches. Roughly sixty points apart, purely because of how much I poured. Any review that does not tell you its dose is not telling you much, and "I used a scoop and a half and it worked great" is a different experiment from mine. For what it is worth, close to 200 millilitres of powder is a fifth of a kilogram of soap per load, and I do not think anybody needs to do that.
Ariel is a brand name that Procter & Gamble puts on completely different formulations in different countries. I tested Ariel from seven countries across four continents and the scores ran from 10.6 to 102.4. If someone reviewed the Brazilian Ariel with Downy built in, they reviewed a product that scored a 10.6 on my bench. That is not a disagreement with me about the 2X powder. It is a different bottle. Full table further down.
I test in a Miele front loader. When I ran a Vietnamese Ariel powder that is formulated for hand washing and top loaders, it scored 42.2 in my GE top loader, which I know does not clean nearly as well as the Miele, so I levelled it out and it came to around 65. I have also had oddly weak results from several Brazilian detergents in a row and my honest read is that they may just not be compatible with American water and machines. A home reviewer on different water, in a different machine, at a different temperature, is measuring a different thing.
Most product reviews come down to someone holding a shirt up to a window. Mine comes down to a spectrometer reading a colour value, on one fixed scale, against a control I re-run constantly. That is not me being clever, it is just the only way to compare 78 products without my own expectations doing the scoring for me.
The short version: a score is only comparable to other scores from the same bench, the same dose and the same scale. Mine says Ariel 2X powder out-cleaned everything else I own. It does not say your neighbour is wrong about her wash.
I want to be blunt about this, because the score alone will mislead you. Ariel 2X powder contains 68 fragrance ingredients. That is why it scores only 6 out of 10 on ingredient safety. There is nothing especially worrying in the base formula, but that quantity of perfume brings a lot of sensitizers, which are the things that irritate skin.
"This is a skin sensitizer nightmare. The chemist that I work with that does all my ingredient safety was blown away by the amount of perfume in it. If you have sensitive skin, you should not use this product."
That is not a soft caution and there is no workaround I would recommend. There is no free and clear version of this detergent to fall back on, which is exactly why I keep asking for one in public. If fragrance is a problem in your house, this page ends here for you and my non-toxic and free-and-clear detergent picks are where you should go instead.
The packaging is the other soft spot, at 4 out of 10. It comes in a plastic bag that is messy to use and can only be recycled by taking it back to a store. A free and clear version in cardboard would turn this into the easiest recommendation I have.
Honestly, it surprised me. My own explanation is a guess rather than a finding: I suspect it contains a lot of bleach, which would help enormously on stain removal and on pulling colour back out of a stain. That would sit consistently with the rest of my powder shortlist, because the other two powders I recommend are Tide with bleach and Tide with Oxi, and a detergent carrying oxygen bleach is what wins on the coffee, tea, wine and tomato family of stains. I have not verified the formulation myself, so treat it as a hypothesis with a good fit, not a fact.
You want the most stain removal available for the least money, you are not fragrance-sensitive, and you do not mind a powder. It is my top performer and one of my best value products of 2025, which almost never happens at the same time. It is a particularly good pick if you deal with dirty, heavily soiled loads or want a powder for whitening and colour correction.
You or anyone in the house has sensitive skin or reacts to fragrance. Also skip it if you want a free and clear product, if plastic-bag packaging bothers you, or if you carry your laundry to a laundromat or travel with it, because a heavy bag of powder is genuinely a nuisance to move around.
Because the brand travels and the formula does not, it is worth seeing the spread. These are my own scores for Ariel products from seven countries. Note that the American and Mexican 2X powder sits on my domestic board while the rest sit on a separate international board, so the comparison here is between Ariel products rather than against everything else I test.
| Ariel product | Market | Score | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2X PowderThe product reviewed on this page | USA / Mexico | 102.4 | Top performer, inexpensive, loaded with fragrance |
| Gel | England | 95.3 | Smashed it, second-best Ariel of the lot |
| Platinum Pods | Spain | 85.9 | Did great, took the bronze |
| Pods | England | 81.7 | Impressive given roughly 20% less product than a Tide pod |
| Powder | Germany | 72.7 | Quite nice, likely good as a whitening soak |
| Snoopy Edition | Japan | 60.0 | Disappointing, and worse than water on pig blood, but it sanitizes |
| Powder, top-loader formula | Vietnam | 42.2 | Built for hand wash and top loaders; around 65 once levelled to my front loader |
| With Downy | Brazil | 10.6 | Expected a hit from the built-in softener, not this |
Scores are stain-removal performance from my own spectrometer testing. Rows are ordered by score, not by the order I tested them. Vietnam is listed at its raw 42.2; the roughly 65 figure is my normalization for the weaker top-loading machine it had to run in.
The brand history explains the confusion. Ariel is what Procter & Gamble calls this family of detergents nearly everywhere outside the United States, where the same company sells Tide. It shows up as Ace across Latin America, Daz in the UK, and Bonux in the Middle East and Africa. Same corporate parent, same shelf position, recipes tuned market by market, and as the table shows, results that are nowhere near interchangeable.
Ariel 2X sits at the top of a very tight group of three, and which one you should actually own depends on what you are optimizing for.
The full ranked list, with prices, safety scores and links, is in my best laundry detergent guide. If your real problem is a specific stain rather than a detergent choice, my lab-tested stain remover rankings are the better page, and the cheapest trick there is rubbing a little liquid detergent into the stain before it goes in the machine.
On raw stain removal, yes. Ariel 2X scored 102.4, above Tide Hygienic Power Pods at 100 and Tide Odor Refresh at 96.9. But both brands belong to Procter & Gamble, and performance is one input out of several. Tide Odor Refresh is free and clear and is what I use on my own clothes, because Ariel 2X is far too heavily fragranced for me.
No. It has 68 fragrance ingredients and scores 6 out of 10 for ingredient safety, and the chemist who does my ingredient-safety scoring was blown away by the amount of perfume in it. If you have sensitive skin, you should not use this product, and there is no free and clear version to switch to.
Because reviewers are usually not measuring the same thing. Dose alone can swing a score by sixty points, as it did for me on the German Ariel powder. Ariel is a different formulation in every market, and my own seven-country test produced scores from 10.6 to 102.4 under one brand name. Machines and water differ too. My number comes from a spectrometer on one fixed scale, not from looking at a swatch.
Yes. The 2X powder is the American and Mexican product, and it is the one that scored 102.4. I bought a 4.4 pound bag for about 5 dollars. Elsewhere, Procter & Gamble sells this brand family as Ariel where Americans see Tide, plus Ace in Latin America, Daz in the UK and Bonux in the Middle East and Africa.
About 7 cents, based on the 5 dollars I paid for a 4.4 pound bag, against a market average of around 20 cents a load. That is why it was one of my best value products of 2025 as well as my top performer.
Not that I have found, and I have asked for one publicly more than once. A free and clear version in cardboard packaging is the one change that would take this from a conditional recommendation to an easy one.
Ariel 2X powder is the best-cleaning laundry detergent I have tested, at 102.4 against a benchmark of 100, and it costs about 7 cents a load, which is the rarest combination in this category. In case it wasn't clear, I do recommend this product. But performance is not the whole picture, and this is the clearest example on my entire board of why: 68 fragrance ingredients, a 6 out of 10 for ingredient safety, plastic-bag packaging, and no free and clear option. If your skin is fine with heavy fragrance, buy it and enjoy paying about a third of what your neighbours pay per load. If it is not, take the score as information and buy something gentler.
Or ask about any laundry or garment care question
Zach Pozniak is VP of Operations and co-owner of Jeeves of Belgravia New York, the Madison Avenue dry cleaner serving New York since 1979, and the fourth generation of his family in the trade. Zach posts garment care techniques as @jeeves_ny on TikTok to over 900,000 followers, and his book The Laundry Book, co-written with his father Jerry Pozniak, was featured on Good Morning America in October 2024. Jeeves NY's clients include the Metropolitan Opera, the Met Museum, and FIT, and the business has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and New York Magazine.