Word: soapless
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...antiseptic soaps are not true soaps made of fat and lye but the recent "soapless soaps" (TIME, Jan. 5). The most powerful disinfectants among them are complicated organic compounds based on ammonium. Their use in softening, cleansing and disinfection is due to a positive charge on the organic part of the molecule. It is strongly attracted by protein, thus apparently seizes on the proteins of bacteria. By the only known test the bacteria are dead, i.e., they no longer increase and multiply bacteria...
...Valko and Mr. DuBois "revived" them: They used other soapless soaps, based on sulfuric acid, in which the active part of the molecule is negative. The positive and negative charges of the two soaps neutralized each other and the bacteria, thus freed of the soapy narcosis, went on with their life (i.e., propagated...
...Frenchmen Dumas and Peligot in 1836. They began their concoctions with fatty alcohols extracted from whale oil, but the product was too costly to compete with that age-old detergent, soap. During World War I, when fats for soapmaking were scarce, German chemists again tried in earnest to concoct soapless soaps. Real success did not come until after the war, when they developed the sodium alkyl sulfates. Production of these substances was not practical until the 1930s, after techniques were developed which could convert fats to fatty alcohols under pressures...
Compared with soap, wetting agents have three advantages: they will work 1) in the presence of acids, 2) in hard water, 3) in cold water. Many a U.S. woman has long been washing her clothes, hair and teeth with these soapless soaps-e.g., Procter & Gamble's "Dreft," "Drene," etc., and Colgate's similar line, whose unusual chemistry has not been emphasized in their makers' advertising. Chemists are trying to put a soapless detergent into cake form. When they succeed, as they may any day now, its advantages-notably in the vast U.S. hard-water zones-will...
...leaves are a good substitute for soap. Soap "deprives the body of fat," anyhow, and it is better to take a lot of soapless air baths...