The Loony Bin

Last year I visualized this goal as being able to understand the ingredients list on a package of Twinkies. This year, in my hubris, I expanded the definition to being able to read and understand what's going on in department store shampoo. This is beginning to look like an impossible task. Part of the difficulty is that they use what scientists call "trivial nomenclature", meaning neither modern scientific names that give a scientifically educated person insight into the structure of the chemicals, nor common names that everyone understands. Most of these are out-of-date scientific names.

Here is the ingredients list from the back of a bottle of Pantene:

Water, Ammonium Laureth Sulfate, Ammonium Lauryl Sulfate, Glycol Distearate, Dimethicone, Cetyl Alcohol, Sodium Chloride, Cocamide MEA, Fragrance, Polyquaternium-10, Sodium Citrate, Hydrogenated Polydecene, Sodium Benzoate, Disodium EDTA, PEG-7M, Trimethylolpropane Tricaprylate/Tricaprate, Citric Acid, Panthenol, Panthenyl Ethyl Ether, Ammonium Xylenesulfonate, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Methylisothiazolinone.

"Laureth" is short for "Lauryl Ether". Lauryl referring to "lauric acid", a non-intuitive name for dodecanoic acid that comes from the fact that back in 1842 it was first discovered through an attempt to make soap from the fat of laurel berries.

"Glycol Disterate" is short for Ethylene Glycol Distearate. "Glycol" is an out-dated term for a diol (which in term is a shortened way of saying di-alcohol, basically a compound containing two OH groups). The naming for this is a bit convoluted. Glycerine had been synthesized in the late 1700s, and was named from the Greek "glykeros", meaning sweet, due to its flavor. Further research demonstrated that glycerine was in fact a tri-alcohol, and it's name was appropriately changed to glycerol (Or possibly they found out it was an alcohol first... not sure about this). When Charles Wurtz created glycol in 1856, it seems that he wanted to make it clear that he had gotten the idea for it after learning about glycerine's triol nature. "Stearate" is short for "stearic acid" a purified form of "stearin" (from the Greek "stéatos" meaning "beef tallow", the source stearin was first extracted from in the late 1700s) and an obsolete term for octadecanoic acid.

That's just the first 4 ingredients. If I had just ambled into the grocery store and picked a bottle of shampoo off the shelf, (rather than spending more time than I expected this to take poring over Google Books and Google Scholar) the label would be practically meaningless, even understanding modern IUPAC nomenclature. If I had done this before taking a year-and-a-half of science, the label would be totally meaningless.