By Robin Murphy
A cleaning product has a strange problem: most of what makes it work is invisible.
You can’t watch a surfactant surround oily soil. You can’t see a chelating agent binding with minerals. Even when a product is doing exactly what it was formulated to do, there may not be much happening that looks particularly impressive.
That’s not ideal when you’re trying to sell cleaning products.
So they put on a show.
Fragrance is one way. In a 2021 survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers who used household products, 26 percent said one purpose of fragrance in household cleaners was to indicate that a space had been cleaned or sanitized. Fifty-four percent said a cleaning job was well done when the home smelled “clean.” The survey was designed and analyzed by Procter & Gamble and conducted by an independent research firm, which is important context, but the responses themselves are fascinating.
We aren’t only asking fragrance to smell good. We’re asking it to tell us the job happened.
Soap suds do something even more visible. We’ve learned to read bubbles as evidence that soap or detergent is working. More bubbles, more cleaning. A sink full of foam looks productive in a way that a sink full of slightly cloudy water does not.
Manufacturers know this isn’t just an aesthetic preference. It can affect whether consumers believe the product works.
A Procter & Gamble patent filing describes an initial burst of foam as “Flash Suds” and calls it the first consumer “touch point,” signaling that the detergent is working effectively. The patent goes on to describe other points in the washing and rinsing process when the amount of suds is meant to communicate something to the person doing the washing. Too little at the wrong moment can make a consumer question whether the detergent worked.
The suds don’t just have to exist. They have to perform.
Thickness can play a similar trick.
A thick cleaning liquid can seem concentrated and powerful. A thin one can seem diluted or weak, even when looking at the liquid tells us very little about what its chemistry will do once it reaches something dirty.
Another detergent patent describes this unusually plainly. It says consumers can associate a viscous liquid with higher quality, and that thicker detergents can appear strong and effective rather than thin and watery. Then it acknowledges the problem: increasing viscosity can create dissolution problems that negatively affect performance.
So the characteristic that makes a cleaner look stronger can make it harder for the cleaner to do its job.
That tells us something about what we’re actually buying in the cleaning aisle. The product has to clean, certainly. But it also has to behave the way we expect a cleaner to behave.
The actual chemistry is doing its work mostly offstage.
What happens in industrial cleaning makes the whole thing even more interesting. In many automated and industrial applications, foam isn’t something to maximize. It can interfere with equipment and rinsing, which is why defoamers and low-foaming formulations exist in the first place. The EPA describes defoamers as additives used where foam can interfere with product or equipment performance, including dishwasher detergents and industrial process liquids.
Nobody needs a machine to be reassured by bubbles.
At home, the bubbles rise. The liquid looks strong. The fragrance announces that the room has been cleaned.
Elsewhere, they just need the chemistry to work.
