My bottle of Joy was running low. That’s it. That’s the whole crisis that kicked this off.

But you know how it goes — the moment my stash starts looking a bit sad, social media somehow knows. Suddenly my feed was full of ads for concentrated dishwashing liquids I’d never paid attention to before. Bio-Home. UIC. Brands I’d walked past in the supermarket a hundred times without a second thought.

And then, because the universe has a sense of humour, we’d just crossed into 7.7. My hand got itchy. I couldn’t help myself — I had to go check if there were still good 7.7 promos running.

There were.

So what started as “I need to top up my Joy” turned into a full-blown rabbit hole of figuring out what’s actually the best value concentrated dishwashing liquid in Singapore right now. Here’s everything I found, ranked, with real prices.

Where it all started: Yuri Ligent and the 2-tier strategy

Before any of this, our household ran on the basics — Yuri Ligent and Mama Lemon. Cheap, functional, unremarkable. A bottle was a bottle. I genuinely never thought there was more to it.

Then we tried Mama Magica, and that changed.

It cut through oil like a hot knife through butter — I’m not exaggerating, a tiny squeeze was enough for an entire sink of dishes. The problem? It was also one of the pricier options in this category, and using it daily felt like overkill for something as unglamorous as washing a cereal bowl.

So we came up with what I called our 2-tier system:

• Mama Magica — heavily greased pots, pans, the stuff that fights back
• Yuri Ligent — everything else

It worked. Premium performance when we actually needed it, everyday cost kept in check the rest of the time.