Unstoppables

The Power and the Glory

One of the wonders of working with large soap-makers, as I did in the past, was to see all these grown men and women, many with PhDs in chemistry and engineering, on a mission to improve tiny aspects of our lives. The smell of laundry as it comes out of the dryer, the durability and effectiveness of a toilet scented spray, all those things are measured and pondered endlessly by people in labcoats holding note pad boards, looking like pharma stock photos. I remember seeing a row of a dozen nonfunctional toilets with glass doors and a small porthole at head height in each for the person to stick their head in and assess the ambient smell before writing the result. A senior technical manager once told me that the aim of his department was to turn the moment when you take laundry of the washing machine into a “magic moment” (his words). I nearly laughed, but checked myself when I saw the glint in his eyes.

There is no doubt that their hard work has improved our daily lives. My trips to the USSR used to be a form of time travel, and I remember well the 1950s-grade soap powder which spread the dirt on clothes to an even grey cast instead of removing it, and left a faint smell of refrigerated Brie. You can relive that nostalgia today with unscented products, but aside from a few genuinely allergic people and a phalanx of neurotics, who would want to? There is at the very bottom of perfumery an unstated axiom that any pleasant smell is better than no smell at all, and I completely agree. Naturally, everyone will also agree that laundry exposed to the sun and wind smells better than anything you can achieve indoors. It turns out that this is due to photochemical production of aldehydes and ketones, and I assume the giants of soap like P&G and Unilever are working on it.

In the meantime we are stuck with soap scents and fabric softener. Scenting clean fabric is a boss battle with the laws of physics: smells are carried by small oily molecules, and the wash that is supposed to get rid of greasy stuff nixes good smells as well as bad. Furthermore, unless you get very clever, you have to put an inordinate amount of fragrance into the soap for some to be left at the end, and that ends up in wastewater, not a good thing. To compensate for this, you can use fragrance materials that are very substantive, meaning they stick to fabric like mad. The old polycyclic musks (Tonalid, Traseolide, etc) were very good at this but persisted in the environment. Alternatively, you can chemically engineer slow-release of fragrance from the fabric, but that only works with some compounds. Rose -scented damascone was used for this in the early 2000s, and it was a huge gamble because rose did not necessarily smell clean.

The other way is to add smell to fabric softener, which is rinsed out rather than washed. But a lot of people don’t like softener, and consider that it turns proper, grippy, stiff clean laundry into a languid, spineless, decadent thing. This is where Unstoppables¹, a P&G invention, comes in. They were apparently invented by someone I know at P&G, a wonderful guy, so unstoppable himself that I suspect they named it after him. They come as little flat pellets looking vaguely like rat poison, that you chuck into the washing machine with the wash. I have no idea what devilry of solubility, timing, slow release etc. is involved but the fact is they work and leave laundry smelling “good” for weeks. Opinions differ on the result. I like it a lot, and Tania detests it. Putting on a polo shirt with that smell is my suburban version of dressing for dinner in ancient Greece after being anointed with fragrant oils. One is allowed to dream.

1. also called Unstopables in some countries.