A New Kind of Soap #
March 11th, 2008 | In Worth Knowing
Soap, if you don’t know, is a surfactant. That means it attracts both nonpolar compounds (like oils) and polar compounds (like water), thus it attaches to oils on your body and lets water carry them away. Pepfactants are — or will be when we get them — similar, but cooler.
Adding a dash of Pepfactants to laundry detergent seems to confer this switching ability on the whole mixture. It should then be possible to switch off the films that give rise to soap bubbles between the washing and rinsing cycles, so that less water is needed to remove the suds. Pepfactants are biodegradable, so they could also be useful in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.