the presence of lii exchanges the alkyl bromide endgroup for an iodide and encourages trans alkene formation this mixture was satisfactory to continue with a repetitive ylide formation 6 bromo 1 hexanal coupling to extend the hydrophobic tail precursor by one hexadienyl fragment each iteration fig3 illustrates a method for attaching the polar surfactant head group to the oligo 1 6 hexadiene tail fragment in the example shown quaternization of trimethylamine using 19 iodononadeca 1 7 13 triene 3 generates cationic ammonium surfactant 4 trimethylnonadeca 6 12 18 trienylammonium iodide in 93 isolated yield an example employing a derivatized malonate ester fig4 acts to illustrate the utility of employing a polyanionic head group and also serves as an example of a surfactant molecule designed to yield only small molecule remnants following surfactant degradation this design feature is preferred for successfully generating volatile easily removable degradation products iodide precursor 3 may also be converted to its phosphonium ylide using a tertiary phosphine followed by base deprotonation wittig coupling of the ylide with aldehyde functionalized malonate ester 5 yields diethylester 6 in 33 isolated yield which may be saponified to its parent dicarboxylic acid and subsequently deprotonated to the dicarboxylate salt 7 under conditions familiar to those practiced in the art surfactants are characterized by determining the extent to which they exhibit surface active properties two traditional methods are relied upon to achieve this determining the extent to which the surfactant can solubilize a water insoluble dye and its surface tension properties the solubilization of a water insoluble dye is used herein to confirm the presence of micellar aggregates in the present surfactant solution and to determine the critical.