In article .com,
writes:
|
| Oh, come off it! That is precisely what soaps ARE, and most common
| detergents are fairly similar. And the reason has nothing to do with
| surplus fat that people don't want to eat.
|
| Similar in the sense that they combine a longish carbon chain molecule
| with a hydrophobic group at one end that wants to be in oil and a
| hydrophyllic group at the other that prefers to be in water. The net
| effect is to emulsify any free fat or grease in the water.

Precisely.

| | What's this thing about nitrogen and sulphur being a well know warning flag?
|
| Check it out - it is. The point is that sulphur-containing proteins are
| often/usually very bioactive, and a hydrocarbon that contains nitrogen
| is very like a protein.
|
| That is a pretty weird viewpoint and potentially very wrong. It all
| depends on how the sulphur and nitrogen is bonded into the molecule.

Not all, and precisely!

Though I should probably have said "can be" not "is"! The point is that
both nitrogen and sulphur occurring in what is largely a hydrocarbon IS
a well known warning flag. Some such compounds are quite harmless; some
are not. Non-chemists (such as me and most of the readers here) cannot
guess which.

| Wikipedia said that it did, and I said that I was using that as a
| reference. You may know better.
|
| In that case Wikipedia is incorrect. Are you sure it didn't give the
| formula as
|
| CH3(CH2)nOSO3Na
|
| Where n=11 for classic lauryl/dodecyl sulphate (and related compounds
| exist for other n).

Yes, it did. I misread it, then.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.