The possibility of using the 13C NMR technique as a preliminary screening for the analysis of manufactured household products is presented. Spectra for several surfactants and related products in water solution were obtained for reference. The application of 13C NMR to commercial products shows that many surfactants can easily be distinguished from one another and determined from a single spectrum without laborious separative pretreatments.The complete analysis of commercial detergents is becoming more and more difficult as the complexity of formulations increases. Nowadays, a wide :range of manufactured products usually consists of different ionic and nonionic surfactants and a variety of other organic and inorganic constituents. Complete]y identifying the various components of a modern detergent product can be a very complex task. As a rule, it is necessary to effect separation. The analysis procedures most commonly used are extraction procedures, followed by column chromatography and then by chemical analyses of the various fractions (1-3). None of these procedures, however, is uniformly applicable, and it may be necessary sometimes to proceed by trial aad error, at the expense of time. The procedure which the analyst will adopt depends upon whether the presence of certain surfactants is known or unknown. In other words, a better organized approach to the analysis can certainly be planned if one can have advance information on the nature of the mixture of surfactants presertt in the product under examination. This kind of information, in addition, may be all that is required. In specific market surveys a complete analysis of the cowponents may not be necessary, but the combination of the various surfactants must be continuously and rapidly checked.The application of instrumental methods could furnish an answer to this problem. However, the function of instrumental methods usually has been for identification after qualitative separations have been achieved. Chromatographic techniques, such as TLC and HPLC, certainly have been used to determine surfactants in commercial detergents {4-6). These technique:s are not always suitable for quantitative analysis though. They often require a long time to optimize conditions of analysis and cannot be applied indifferently for any detergent.In the present work the possibility of using 13C FT NMR as a useful analytical tool in the field of detergency is considered.We are routinely applying this technique a/iready as a preliminary screening for the analysis of manufactured products. The high resolution of the technique, by contrast with other instrumental methods, allows one to get useful information without any laborious separation, working directly with the commercial product, if liquid, or simply with an ethanol extract, if powder. One can determine rapidly {usually no more than ca. three hr of repetitive scans) not only the nature of the surfactant mixture, but also useful information on structure and on the presence of other organic and inorganic constituents. Of course...