Researchers from the University of Bristol have created the world's first magnetic soap. The revolutionary soap could find applications in cleaning oil spills and waste water.

The magnetic soap is similar to ordinary soap in that it breaks up the oily particles it touches but the atoms of tiny irons are controlled by a magnet to make the particles easier to clean up.

"If you'd have said about 10 years ago to a chemist: 'Let's have some soap that responds to magnets', they'd have looked at you with a very blank face," co-author of the study Julian Eastoe told BBC News. "We were interested to see, if you went back to the chemical drawing board with the tool kit of modern synthetic chemistry, if you could ... design one."

Soap has two different end molecules: one end molecule is attracted to water and the other is repelled by it. The researchers made the water-loving molecules magnetic. The team added iron in the soap particles that are big enough to be magnetically attractive.

"A single atom alone is not magnetic," Eastoe said. "It is only when put next to neighbors, brothers, that there is a communication between the brothers in a network and that connective communication gives rise to a macroscopic magnetic effect."

The magnetic property of the soap makes it easier for cleanup crews to remove the material from a system like an oil spill. It's possible with this new soap for environmental cleanup crews to dump it in an oil spill and then remove it without leaving dangerous pollutants behind. Eastoe noted that the team is still researching ways to make the soap commercially viable.

"From a commercial point of view, though these exact liquids aren't yet ready to appear in any household product, by proving that magnetic soaps can be developed, future work can reproduce the same phenomenon in more commercially viable liquids for a range of applications from water treatment to industrial cleaning products."