Soap, Detergents and Other Surfactants

I’m dishing up some dirt here on soaps and detergents, more properly called surfactants – more specifically on our (American) over-use of these products.

Let’s start with laundry detergent. According to one source, we use on average about 40% more than we need to. This is in part due to the American sentiment that “more is always better”, which extends to our pesticides, fertilizers and so many other products.

Here’s a shocker to most folks : Soap and detergent do not clean anything. It is the water that does the actual cleaning. Yep, good old H2O is the best dirt cleaner on the planet. The problem is that the water molecule has a surface tension, which normally makes it hard for the molecule to combine with grime and wash it away. That is where surfactants come on. As the name implies, they break the surface tension of water and allow it to more readily sweep the dirt away. That’s the science in a nutshell. But, as usual, I digress.

Another recent development in detergent overuse is the advent of more concentrated laundry products. These certainly make sense, as there is little point in shipping the extra water hither and yon. But, many consumers fail to make the quantitative shift and end up overdosing their laundry. In theory, you would want to use just enough surfactant (detergent) to break the tension of every water molecule in the load. Unless you are a skilled chemist, that is near impossible, given the addition of other factors, like water hardness. So, the manufacturers give you instructions which err on the high side, which also boosts their sales. Even then, many subscribers to the “more is better” school will add even more. At some point, the detergent itself become difficult to remove from the wash. This leads to dingy looking laundry, scum buildup inside the machine and lots more wasted detergent flowing out the drain hose.

So, read the dosing instructions. Trust the manufacturers’ extensive testing. Don’t over-use. If anything, you might slightly UNDER-use, unless your clothes are really badly soiled.

The same sort of overuse is common when it comes to water temperature. The common wisdom is that hot water is best. Simply not true, unless you use water with a temperature near boiling (200F), which will be slightly more effective at germ killing, but do nothing for cleaning power when using modern detergents.

The same logic applies to hair shampoo. If you use enough to create that advertising ideal of a thick lather, you used too much. It is all that EXCESS surfactant that has no water to surfact and instead turns to useless foam. Good for selling shampoo, but a waste of money and a burden on the waste water treatment folks.

This raises yet another digression about shampoo. The product itself is VERY cheap to produce. The basic ingredients sell for around $50 for a 55 gallon drum. In fact, the packaging likely costs more than the product. Read the labels and you’ll find that all shampoos share the same base – mostly water, with good old Sodium Lauryl Sulfate or Sodium Laureth Sulfate, and a splash of a co-surfactant, usually cocamidopropyl betaine . Your special brand may add some exotic ingredients and magic potions, but at its core, it’s all the same to some degree.

So, how do the manufacturers get us to pay $50 a bottle for a $2 product? ADVERTISING. Some of the cleverest advertising has surrounded shampoos for a long time. I was witness to one of the best shampoo scams of all time : Many youngsters may not know or remember this, but back in the day (before 1970), most men washed their hair with bar soap. Oh, a few maybe borrowed their mother’s or girlfriend’s shampoo, but that was considered a feminine product, not for manly men. Enter some marketing geniuses at Pantene. They figured out that if they made a shampoo “for men” that they could boost sales and create a whole new market. Which is just what they did – took their regular shampoo, changed the fragrance to a more “manly scent” and sold the living daylights out of it. When I was on the Esquire 10 Best Dressed list, Pantene offered us samples of the original stuff and asked our opinion. After using the shampoo, which left no soapy residue, we all agreed that we would certainly buy the stuff, even at the greatly increased price over bar soap. And that “squeaky clean” sound that advertisers touted? Yeah, that’s the sound hair makes when it’s been stripped of all its natural oils.

And don’t even get me started on “body shampoos”. Unless you are a steelworker or car mechanic, your body, covered in clothes, just doesn’t get dirty enough to justify an attack with soap. All it does is remove your natural oils and require the use of yet more consumer moisturizing products. A nice water rinse and toweling should get you quite clean. If you want further punishment, use an anti-bacterial soap and kill off all the good bacteria on your skin, allowing the smelly bad guys to take over and the need for even MORE consumer “smell good” products. I’ll leave it at that.

Perhaps the most ridiculous overuse of soapy surfactants is shaving cream. It is mostly useless. The claim that it “softens” the beard (or other unwanted hair), is pure Balderdash. Water softens the beard. A 3 minute soak in the shower is usually enough for the water to penetrate the hair, all by itself. All shaving crème does is accelerate that process by (as we all know by now) breaking the water surface tension. Even if shaving crème, which is just another soap, is used, a thin coating is all that is required. A 1” thick coating, as seen in most commercials, sells more product but does nothing except get in the shavers’ way. For those who don’t shower before shaving, just washing the face with soap and water and leaving the water to set a spell will yield superlative results. Duped again by those insidiously clever admen.

So, save yourself some money and put less waste in the environment by using soaps, detergents and other surfactants SPARINGLY. “More is better” applies to ice cream, but not to soap.

The Agitation Amendment : While surfactants break water tension chemically, there is a more brutal and physical way to do it – agitation. If you hit the water molecule hard enough, just like a water balloon, it will open up and flush the dirt and grime away. You’ve seen this reaction when you make mayonnaise or shake vinegar and oil into an emulsion. This is part of the reason to use less detergent in High Efficiency washers. Primitive cultures know this and “beat” clothes to wash without detergent. Probably not recommended for your Victoria’s Secret collection, however.