Surfactants: A vital function in cleaning

When I first started my DIY cleaning journey, I decided to dive deep into understanding every ingredient in the common cleaning products I was using—what they do, and why they’re in there. One term that kept popping up was "surfactant".

I quickly realised that surfactants are essential in cleaning because they’re the ones that physically lift the ‘dirt’ off the surface.

This article, I am going to explain the science behind Surfactants, Analisa style..

Surfactants like soap, have all these chains which I will refer to as two headed tadpoles. One end has a head that hates water (hydrophobic) and the other end also has a head, but that head loves water (hydroscopic) – that poor tadpole!

When the surfactant is in the wash water, the head that hates water will try and find anything that is not water to attach to, which is our dirt!! All the little tadpoles will form a ring around that atom of dirt, anything to avoid the water.

The head that loves water on the other hand is floating outwards, relaxing and avoiding anything that is not water.

When it is time to rinse, the water loving head will go with the flow of water, pulling the ring full of dirt away. That is why rinsing is so important!!!!

Look at my beautiful picture thanks to Canva so you can get a visual idea. See how the dirt is trapped by a ring of little tadpoles (that is not the technical term) – that is called a Miscelle.

One downfall of our two headed tadpole is – the water hating head will not only attach to the dirt but also any molecules in hard water like the calcium or limestone, which is not ideal.

So, the harder the water the less effective soap/detergent is - but don’t worry there is a solution for that. And the solution is other amazing ingredients like Washing Soda, Borax and Bicarb which are all water softeners and through some charge make a ring around those molecules that make water hard, making it softer. Simply incredible!

I hope that gives you a bit of an understanding about what a surfactant does – because our toolkit has pure soap as ours being our liquid Castile Soap and Coconut Soap Flakes.

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