ABSTRACT
Unilever is one of the largest manufacturers of home and personal care and food products. In 2007 the combined annual turnover was approximately 60 billion euros. Naturally occurring nanostructures have surrounded us for aeons, without being explicitly labeled or indeed identified as nanoscience. The modern discipline of nanoscience has arisen from the exquisite experimental control that enables us to self-assemble atoms and to decompose micron-sized particles to order. Nanoscience is a relatively young word, which is highly subject to interpretation. Science fiction writers would conceive of a rich vein mining phenomena usually associated with quantum mechanics such as superfluids. In a colloidal sense, nanoscience relies on the phenomenon of surfactant self-assembly. Surfactants are amphiphiles—molecules composed of two different moieties each possessing a different physical character, one of which is hydrophilic and the other hydrophobic.
