I was cleaning out a sink with a weak bleach solution (a little bleach dissolved in a sinkful of warm water). When I reached down through the water to take out the drain, my hand got a little bleach on it.
I hate the feel of bleach on skin: no matter how much I wash it, my hand feels slimy while it’s wet and then parched and crackling when it dries. Also, I can’t stand the smell of bleach.
So I got a clever idea: what if I splash a tiny bit of vinegar–like, a couple of tablespoons of wine vinegar–on my hand and rub it in, then rinse it off? The vinegar should neutralize the bleach. I tried it, and it worked beautifully: no slimy sensation, no bleach smell, and water rinsed away the lingering vinegar aroma.
I was pleased with my solution (hah, chemistry joke!), and I looked it up online to see if this Life Hack/Hint from Heloise was well-known. Imagine my surprise when Googling “Bleach Vinegar” returned article after article like this one:
So, yeah, maybe not the genius moment I thought it was. But I’m still curious. Certainly you don’t want to slosh together a cup of full-strength bleach with a cup of white vinegar. But in mild, dilute quantities, how toxic is this combination?
Don’t need answer fast–I don’t plan to do this again–I’m just looking for answers on exactly how much of a fool I was.
My WAG as a non-chemist, non-scientist: It emits chlorine, but chlorine is highly volatile, evaporates quickly and as long as you open doors and windows and ventilate, you should be fine. Also, chlorine can be detected by odor long before it is deadly…however, it might still cause a moderate amount of harm if it is of detectable odor.
And yes, rinsing off your skin with water was the best thing. If you ventilate the air, all should be well.
WAGs aside, note that rinsing bleach with plain water–or even with warm soapy water–leaves my skin feeling unpleasantly slick and gross. The vinegar followed immediately soapy water doesn’t.
In general, initiating an acid - base reaction on your skin is a bad idea. And if I’m not mistaken, mixing bleach with an acid creates phosgene, which is to say mustard gas.
But you’re fine. You would have a very sore throat now, and if your skin isn’t peeling off, both solutions were sufficiently dilute.
For future reference, you wouldn’t want to use a small amount of vinegar, but a dilute solution of vinegar, and you’d want to use several rinses of a weaker solution, rather than one rinse of a stronger (still dilute) one.
And you’d want to use lemon juice, not vinegar, because it will smell better.
Vinegar has a ph similar to the skin, so it’s good for rinsing things off. A small amount will increase the effective concentration of the bleach: a large amount will decrease the effective concentration of the bleach. A small amount will make the bleach more reactive: a large amount will rinse the more-reactive bleach off.
Household bleach rinsed off with household vinegar won’t form enough free chlorine gas to be dangerous with ordinary household ventilation. I Am Not A Chemist, so I don’t know if that’s true for all concentrations and all ratios.
My experience with bleach on my hands is that it seem to strip off the oils on the skin and this makes it weirdly “dry”. Esp. the ridges on my fingertips.
I’ve always just rubbed my fingertips on a suitably still-oily part of my skin or used a hand lotion.
Of course you’re starting by rinsing under plain water, right? That alone should get the amount of bleach on your skin low enough that you probably don’t need to worry about what comes next.
Now that the question’s been answered, here’s a very slight hijack…
My grandmother (born in 1899) swore by soaking her hands in “Javel Water”, aka bleach. She told me it was a common beauty treatment when she was younger, and gave her baby-soft hands.
Truthfully, she never had wrinkly or elderly looking hands, and they were indeed soft as a baby’s behind.
In retrospect, I think she actually meant that she cleaned with the Javel water w/o gloves - can’t imagine soaking in it!