Jump to content

Bar soap has to be made by alchemists or wizards


jsharr

Recommended Posts

It is full of sorcery you see.  It turns from a solid to a foam when you wet it and rub it.   It is slippery and hard to hold, yet body hair sticks to it with impossible tenacity.   It can lead to unexpected prison romance if dropped.  I am sure I am missing some of it's mystical properties.

discus.

  • Heart 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, jsharrwick said:

It is full of sorcery you see.  It turns from a solid to a foam when you wet it and rub it.   It is slippery and hard to hold, yet body hair sticks to it with impossible tenacity.   It can lead to unexpected prison romance if dropped.  I am sure I am missing some of it's mystical properties.

discus.

Better than any of @Randomguy's "discussion" topics!

HUZZAH, Merlin!

  • Thank You 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Razors Edge said:

Better than any of @Randomguy's "discussion" topics!

HUZZAH, Merlin!

I felt like @Randomguy as I typed out this thread.  He was a huge fan of my soap gets less soapy near the center of the bar theory you see.  I also learned "you see" from RG.  

  • Heart 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...
On 2/25/2022 at 11:10 AM, jsharr said:

It is full of sorcery you see.  It turns from a solid to a foam when you wet it and rub it.   It is slippery and hard to hold, yet body hair sticks to it with impossible tenacity.   It can lead to unexpected prison romance if dropped.  I am sure I am missing some of it's mystical properties.

discus.

When I was in chemistry graduate school at IIT, I took a course in Polymer Chemistry from a PhD Chemist who worked for Sherwin Williams.

I was about certain kinds of paints, plastics, soaps and other things made from long chains of carbon atoms.

And it was kind of mystical how the length of the chains, the branching of the chains, the other elements attached to them and the polar or non-polar elements and functional groups at each end of the chains made the polymers work as soaps, surfactants, brittle plastics, pliable plastics, coatings that hugged metals or wood or etc.

Something related to how soaps work - one end of the carbon chain water-soluble, the other end oil-soluble - is how mining floatation reagents work to separate the metal containing particles of ground-up ores to simplify purification.  If I had 10 years and $10 million and wanted the aggravation, I could figure out the chemical formula and its low-cost synthesis for a floatation reagent for gold.  There are thousands of tons of mining waste sitting around places like the Black Hills of South Dakota that are 0.1% gold, but it costs more than its worth to purify it.  A floatation reagent would make it very profitable.  I worked on copper floatation reagents that worked like a charm.  You know, copper, in the same Group 11 chemical family as gold and silver!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...