Ingredient lists that don't really tell you much.

Can’t they use nitrogen? Spring water sprays do.

Nonsense. You don’t to reach the critical point of the propellant, just enough pressure to condense some of the propellant. While performance may not be as wonderful as hydrocarbon or fluorocarbon propellants, high quality cans and fillers like this can produce perfectly respectable aerosols with compressed air alone.

The ingredients list for a typical Air Wick aerosol is here, and lists Water, Ethanol, Trideceth-9, Compressed Air, Sodium Borate, Fragrance, and Benzisothiazolinone (a preservative). The MSDS lists 3 - 7% ethanol.

mnemosyne, you left out cocobetaine!

From some sort of snack (chocolate bar? - I forget) I had in India:
Content: 5 % calcium, 95 % other important ingredients

There’s also “nature-identical”, which means the flavouring chemical is the same one as that found in natural snozzberry, but it’s been artificially synthesised. This has two benefits: it’s usually cheaper than the natural thing, and it’s also usually purer. Of course, people being people, they think that a molecule of β-snozzolactone extracted from a snozzberry (probably using all manner of solvents etc) is somehow much superior to a molecule of β-snozzolactone produced in the lab, even though they are totally indistinguishable.

Not necessarily a “strong acid or base”: it’s used to adjust pH but it can be an acid, base or tamponated solution (a solution whose pH will remain stable when mixed with other things, unless you add a real big amount of these other things). A tamponated solution usually contains a salt formed by a weak acid plus a strong base (for example, sodium acetate) or conversely a salt formed by a weak base plus a strong acid (for example, ammonia salts). An acid or base used to adjust pH may be strong or not: ammonia, citric acid and acetic acid are all weak and all commonly used to adjust pH.

The more usual name in English is a “buffer solution”. “Tamponated solution” sounds much less pleasant. :slight_smile:

My favourite was from an Eat-More candy bar – “May contain cherries”. The idea that they sometimes toss some cherries into the mix struck me as odd.

That sounds more like something to cover their arse over allergies (are people allergic to cherries?) Probably they make some cherry candy on the same production line, so they have to warn people that the occasional rogue remnant of cherry might be found, if they didn’t clean the line properly between batches.

I often see “Made in a factory which processes gluten, peanuts, tree nuts, etc…” even if it doesn’t contain those, as a CYA statement.