Good morning! It’s time to start a new day. It feels so good to stretch out slowly. Nothing like a little exercise and a shower to give you new energy. Before you turn on the shower, check if you did not forget the sodium salt of palmitic acid. Without it, a shower is not a shower. It is right there at the soapbox. No problem! Feel how well it cleans your pores with pleasant foam. Oops! The monoethanolamine lauryl sulfate, the cetylic alcohol and the panthenol are almost finished. Maybe there is enough just for one more time. So, do not forget to write down the shampoo in your shopping list.

While you brush your teeth with sorbitol and calcium carbonate, think how Chemistry is present in your every-day-life. Look for the products that you and your family use for personal hygiene. They are so many and so varied that it is difficult to list them. Besides the soap, the shampoo and the toothpaste, there are many others, which could only be made thanks to the discoveries of Chemistry. Without it, simple routine acts like taking a bath and brushing your teeth would be quite a sacrifice. Imagine how would it be if instead of the soft nylon brush with a colorful and anatomic handle you had to use ground stone or wooden splinters to clean your teeth. How would you convince your children to do it after every meal? We better not even think about it…

Where is the shaving cream? Or, better yet, where is the mixture of stearic acid, emulsifier, triethanolamine and a pH corrector? Maybe the children placed it along with your wife’s octyldodecanol, acid red and ethyl acetate. No, it is not in the middle of her lipsticks. Maybe it is at the side of the iron oxide and titanium dioxide or the lauryl ether sodium sulfate. No, it is not between the blush and the makeup cleaner either. Look! There is your shaving cream hiding behind the propyleneglycol and the cetyl palmitate, near the panthenol and the sodium hyaluronate. Yeah, behind the makeup near the moisturizing cream.

OK. Now that you have shaved it is time for the glycerin, zinc sulfate and alcohol, all present in the refreshing after-shave lotion. And, of course, now comes also the acetylated lanolin alcohol, ingredient used in the formulation of deodorants. As a final touch, pick up some of your preferred tetrahydroxybenzophenone. It is soothing cologne to help you go through a hot day. And now that we mentioned a hot day, do not forget to protect yourself from the sun with the ethylhexyl p-methoxycinnamate. This active product, used in the sun blocks is one more of the discoveries of Chemistry that helps mankind with a better life. Very well, now you are ready to face one more working day. Do not worry. When you come back home, Chemistry will be again at your service, to help you relax. After all, it is also present in your day-to-day in such a way that you do not even notice its presence. Unless, of course, you run out of sodium salt of palmitic acid, acetylated lanolin alcohol, panthenol…

Text: Luiz Carlos de Medeiros (Mtb 12.293) English version by Joe Vianna (translat@mvpisp.com)