greasy bleach bath hands?

Does it remove the odor as well?

Only remotely related, but rubbing anything stainless steel will remove the smell of onions or garlic from your hands. :)
 
Does it work with skunks OG? Did you try tomato juice happychem?
OG, can you invent stainless steel chewing gum for those "just ate a slice of garlic pizza gotta talk to this girl" nights? :OT: For those unmarried ppl of course :D .
 
Tomato juice would work as well, so would lemon juice, it's the acid that's doing the work on the bleach, which is a base.

It does remove the bleach smell, but it's replaced by a vinegar smell, so not much gained, except maybe that soap should help for the vinegar, but probably wouldn't for the bleach. Both soap and bleach are basic.

That's what 'Binaca' is for beviking! ;) Just don't let anyone see you use it, looks kinda cheesy...
 
Vinegar would be preferable--those few times I use bleach. I have a terrible reaction to it--gives me hives clear up to my arm pits. One more reason why I prefer Oxyclean!

If you can handle chewing on stainless steel, the onion-breath might not be the problem! :) I'm more in favor of sipping peppermint schnapps.

happychem--any reason you can think of for the stainless steel to work on onion/garlic oder? I suspect it has something to do with the metal reacting with the sulfers but can't find anything to support that.
 
I can throw something out there, but it's really just an educated guess.

From what I understand, the process of making steel stainless involves adding a thin layer of iron oxide to the surface. Yes, that would be otherwise known as rust, but we're talking really thin layer. This works because the whole exposed surface is already oxidized, so the reaction can't proceed any deeper. But when you scratch stainless steel, like with a sharp knife, you remove that surface layer and the exposed steel starts to oxidize.

I suspect that you're right about the sulfur compounds. A lot of taste and smell chemicals are sulfur compounds. Sulfur is not terribly electronagative, meaning that it doesn't hold onto its electrons (or steal them from other atoms) very strongly. It's not weak, just that it's such a big atom (relatively speaking) that the attraction between the nucleus and the outer electrons (valence electrons) is weaker than its smaller cousin oxygen. So in the tug of war for electrons between the two, oxygen wins.

I suspect that the iron oxide on the surface of the steel acts as a catalyst to oxidize the smell molecules. But like I said, that's just an educated guess.
 
Better than I could come up with--never thought to look into what stainless steel is, I just focused on the dang onions! Makes sense to me. Very, very cool. You get double bonus points for answering my weird questions! :)


Points, like in Who's Line Is it...Though I won't make you do anything 'special' with Drew Carey. ;)
 
Aw, sweet! Bonus points! And without anything 'special' with Drew Carey!

I wouldn't put too many chips on my explanation, I didn't research it or anything, just guessed.

Along this line of thought, there is a book called "Radar, hoolahoops and playful pigs" by Dr. Joe Schwartz that talks about the chemistry of everyday things. When I was doing my undergrad at McGill I took a class that he taught along with Drs. Ariel Fenster and David Harpp called "The World of Chemistry". It was a positively brilliant class. It was geared towards the "non-chemist" (which ironically did not make it an "easy-A", which I learned the hard way ;) ) but they had just enough chemistry in it to allow a chemist to connect all the dry thoery we learned in class to the real world.

I'll see if I can find a link...
 
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