Soap Experiment

Pictures, explanation and experiment by N and R. Edited by truly yours. Here you go:

We did a little soap experiment today about "which soap floats and which sink". We used three different brands of soap. Irish spring, Ivory, and Dial. Here is what we came up with:

Dial:

 As soon as we put a bar of Dial in a container with warm water, it sank immediately.


 Irish spring:



Next, we decided to put a bar of Irish spring and that sank too.


Ivory



Last but not least, we put a bar of Ivory.. Hey! Ivory floats! Woohoo!

Since ivory is the only one that floats, we decided to do some research why that floats alone. We found out that the mixing process used in making Ivory soap adds air into the bar which reduces its density and thus make it less dense than water. Guess what that means.. you will never loose your bar of soap in your bubble bath when it slips off your hands..

Since we were at it, we decided to take it a notch up and did one more science experiment. We microwaved the bar of ivory on a  piece of waxed paper for about 90 seconds. Here is how it turned out:

Before:




After:




Huge different, right? We have some Soap Mousse!!

The soap felt brittle and flaky, but its still soap! It is just a huge chunk of soap now! And definitely a conversation piece as it now sits in the guest bathroom! 

Researching why the soap turned into foam, we learnt this: Soap softens when heated. The air and water trapped in the soap is also heated which causes the water to vaporize and the air to expand. The expanding gases pushes on to the softened soap causing it to expand as well and become foam-like. Popping popcorn works pretty much in the same way. We have some cool plans for this Soap Mousse. Stay tuned!! More experiments coming later in the week!