3 ms·
If the stuff is clearly labelled ethanol, for cleaning/burning, made from biological sources, you can be pretty sure it's just simple continuous distilled sugar
by namibj 7y ago
If the stuff is clearly labelled ethanol, for cleaning/burning, made from biological sources, you can be pretty sure it's just simple continuous distilled sugar-based (likely via yeast) reasonably high-purity ethanol with mandated-by-law denaturation additives (over here in Germany that'd be ~1% methyl-ethyl-ketone and a hint of denatonium benzoate) to make it taste too bad for people to get drunk from it.
This is far from random paint thinner or random mineral-oil-based lighter fluid/accelerant.
For use on your hands the normal home and garden ethanol is sufficiently harmless, and will itself do more damage than any residues. After all, it's made for use in situations where most people don't wear gloves.
- forkexec 7y agoSorry, wrong... you're making a big leap of assumption rather than understanding what grades mean. If it's not food / cosmetics grade, you have no idea what toxic impurities are left in it... that's why the fuel-kind is cheap and for burning, not placing on your hands. Unless you have a decent mass spectrometer, you can feel free to gamble with your and your own family's health and/or lives.
- namibj 7y agoI might be have made wrong assumptions about consumer safety regulations where you are. I'm pretty sure you can't sell anything in Germany to consumers that's toxic on contact with hands if it's something people usually touch and you don't warn about it. The reason the fuel-type is this cheap is that it's taxed much less than the drinking kind. For technical applications they have good reason to keep if clean, safe for traces of impurities. The stuff they use for non-medical hand sanitizer and such should come from the same factory. There isn't much you can do wrong when producing industrial quantities of generic technical ethanol. I'm sorry if I caused confusion though.