Ariel (detergent) Automatic" powder. Though with the increasing popularity of automatic front-loading washing machines, a suitable low-suds variant "Ariel Automatic" was eventually launched in the early 1980s. The mid-eighties saw the range expanding to encompass liquid detergent and compact powder. The compact powder was originally known as "Ariel Ultra"; and was subsequently reformulated into the nineties as "Ariel Future". This was possibly in response to Unilever's launch of the ultimately doomed "Persil Power", which was seen to damage clothes. Compact powders never proved popular in the UK, so when the tablet variant appeared in July 1999, the compact version disappeared. In 2003,
Laundry detergent cotton, wool, polyamide and polyacrylonitrile, sodium triphosphate removes soil more effectively than a surfactant alone. With hydrophobic fibres like polyesters and polyolefins, the effectiveness of the surfactant surpasses that of the builder. Surfactants are responsible for most of the cleaning performance in laundry detergent. They provide this by absorption and emulsification of soil into the water and also by reducing the water's surface tension to improve wetting. Laundry detergents contain mostly anionic and non-ionic surfactants. Cationic surfactants are normally incompatible with anionic detergents and have poor cleaning efficiency; they are employed only for certain special effects, as fabric softeners, antistatic