Why do chemicals like shampoo and soap ingredients have such crazy long names? How are the names developed?

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For example, my kids J&J baby wash has ingredients like cocamidopropyl, pentaerythrityl tetrastearate, and ethylhexylglycerine.

In: Chemistry

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Anonymous 0 Comments

As others have mentioned, IUPAC gives us chemists a long list of rules about how to name chemicals. This way, we can accurately translate a chemical structure into a name, and any other chemist can know exactly what molecule we are talking about even if they’ve never heard of or seen that chemical before. Sometimes we shorten common chemical names, or portions of those names. So not all of the chemical names you’ll see are truly IUPAC, but rather “common names” citric acid is a good example since the real name of citric acid would be confusing and unrecognizable to the average consumer.

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