My bleach bottle is 0.39% sodium hypochlorite (which is the bleach chemical). My hydrogen peroxide is 3%. How are these things effective at such low concentrations?
In: Chemistry
A single gram of hydrogen peroxide contains 17690000000000000000000 molecules.
So even if you dissolve that in 32 grams of water to get a 3% solution, you still have a staggering number of reactions that can occur.
In this case the low concentration is necessary to render the solution safe for use. Hydrogen peroxide is an incredibly reactive chemical that is dangerously corrosive and explosive in high concentrations.
2 answers:
1)some chemicals speed up reactions that happen naturally, without actually participating in the reaction, we call these catalysts. In this case, the catalyst isn’t “used up” when it does its job, so one molecule of catalyst could make a theoretically infinite amount of other reactions happen much quicker. An example of this is CFCs destroying the ozone layer. Even a small number of cfc molecules could dismantle trillions of ozone molecules.
2) the thing they’re working on is also low concentration. If you’re using bleach to destroy a pigment (I’m guessing you’re bleaching hair?) Then you might only need 1 bleach molecule for each pigment. If your pigment was only 2%of your total hair mass, and your bleach was 2% of your solution, then you’d need equal parts hair and bleach – that isn’t very much bleach.
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