We have shown that under certain conditions multilayer adsorption of surfactants occurs at the air-water interface. in which case the system becomes a powerful wetting agent (it will wet Teflon). A range of useful technological properties follows from this, e.g. more effective detergency, and since the phenomenon seems to be associated with more charged ions such as calcium and aluminium, hard water would enhance detergency in contrast to the usual reduction. An added advantage would be to do this with renewable surfactants. The alkyll ester sulphonates are renewables from palm oil and we have shown that the C14 and C16 methyl esters have a rich multilayer surface phase diagram with aluminium. The ion interaction is crucially dependent on the head group size and shape and we propose to tune the interactions via the ester group.