Fabric care compositions containing a polymeric fluorescent whitening agent

Claim 1

A fabric care composition comprising: (a) from about 1% to about 75% by weight of a surfactant selected from the group consisting of soap, nonionic surfactant, anionic surfactant, ampholytic surfactant, zwitterionic surfactant, cationic surfactant and mixtures thereof; and (b) a copolymer whitening agent having the formula ##STR6## wherein: R is a difunctional aryl group or a difunctional straight or branched alkyl chain having 4 to 16 carbons; R 1 is hydrogen, an aliphatic group having 1 to 20 carbons, an aryl, an alkaryl, a secondary amine, an alkali metal sulfonate, an alkali metal carboxylate, an alkyl ether or a halogen atom; R 2 is a straight or branch chain alkoxy group having 1 to 16 carbons, an aryloxy or a substituted aryloxy group; R 3 is a straight or branch chain alkyl group having 1 to 16 carbons; and R 4 is a difunctional fluorescent moiety; x is selected such that the difunctional hydrophobic group is present at 0-49 mol% of the composition mixture when the copolymer is polymerized; y is selected such that the R 2 group is present at 0-45 mol% of the mixture; z is selected such that the (OR 3 ) n group is present at 5-45 mol% of the mixture wherein n is an integer between 2 and 200; and w is selected such that the R 4 group is present at 1-50 mol% of the reaction mixture.