A practical example of a colloid is fog. If you look closely at fog or steam in a sauna, you can see the extremely tiny droplets of water floating around in the air. They just move around randomly and never seem to stop.

What has this got to do with cleaning?

With a colloidal cleaner, we have small active entities called micelles, a micelle is a chemistry term which simply put is a molecule, that contains two distinct parts, a long tail that is totally water insoluble, the hydrophobic end, this term is derived from Latin, and is defined as fear of water. The second or head part is totally water soluble, called the hydrophilic end, this term is derived from Latin, and means love of water.

These active entities (micelles) arrange themselves in near spherical alignment, this is very fortunate for all, as this means that the surface area is near perfect and ultimately leads to better cleaning ability.

In the colloidal state, because the number of effective micelles present per volume is increased exponentially, that means we have so much more cleaning “oomph”. Now imagine this happening in a solution of water, where we have micelles, we have dirt and we have a mess to clean, due to the enormous number of our micelles in our colloidal cleaner, we have a greater and more comprehensive ability to clean a wide range of surfaces, fabrics and indeed the air we breath. This is occurring both rapidly and constantly, and in a short space of time all the dirt is removed from the surface. Just as importantly, the micelles stop the pieces of dirt or grease in the water from rejoining so they cannot clump back on to the surface that has been cleaned.

This is basically different to the way soap and detergents clean. They tend to stick to the dirt and grease like iron filings sticking to a magnet, then float around in the water carrying the globule with them, in most cases, separating and clumping back together.

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