I just finished polishing my boots after nearly an hour and a half - they are now polished to a reflective shine. Now I would like to drink some whiskey. But when I was a kid, I had this book called “Scary Facts” that claimed that if you drink alcohol while or after handling shoe polish, some kind of chemical reaction takes place that can create poison gas, killing you.
Is there any truth to this? Will I die if I have a glass of Scotch right now?
Well, there’s one way to find out… :eek:
Sounds like BS re injested alcohol predisposing you to death by polish fumes, unless possibly you pass out face first into a big cake sized tin of Kiwi.
I was once a very poor college student in ROTC who made money by polishing other cadets shoes to the highest possible shine. To get through this monotonous task, I used to drink for the several hours a week while I worked on them. Although I have moderate to mild brain damage now, it doesn’t seem to hinder me much. The thing that pissed me off was that the people that paid me to do their shoes often got the best dressed awards while I never did. I wouldn’t worry about it.
Okay, here’s what’s generally in shoe polish (from Wikipedia): “It is usually made from ingredients including some or all of naphtha, lanolin, turpentine, wax (often Carnauba wax), gum arabic, ethylene glycol, and if required a colourant, such as carbon black or an azo dye (such as aniline yellow). It typically has a specific gravity of 0.8, is negligibly soluble in water, and is made of between 65 and 77% volatile—usually naphtha. The high amount of volatile substances means that the shoe polish will dry out and harden after application, while retaining its shine.”
Now naptha, turpentine, and ethylene glycol can all be toxic. Naptha is just petroleum ether, a mixture of fairly short hydrocarbons. Turpentine is mostly pinenes. You don’t want to go ingesting either of those, of course. The ethylene glycol is probably the most immediately toxic of the three. But none of those are about to go forming any sort of poisonous gas just by reacting the various compounds in an alcoholic drink. The pet ether is going to be completely unreactive. The pinenes might form tert-butanol cyclohexenes but I hope you don’t have sulfuric acid in your drink. Even then, that’d be a liquid. Ethylene glycol is a dialcohol and should be no more reactive with the contents of your drink than the ethanol itself.
So, wash your hands good and go enjoy your Scotch.
Usually when hazard sheets indicate that alcohol may increase toxicity… they are suggesting that because the liver is busy processing alcohol, other toxins may not be metabolised rapidly enough to prevent damage. This generally requires a sufficient alcohol consumption to overload the livers processing capacity (about 25ml per hour, 1 standard unit)
However, in the case of Ethylene glycol, alcohol is used as a treatment, slowing down the livers processing of the glycol to prevent the buildup of toxic metabolites.
I can’t see what could be toxic in polish, but I think I’ll stop cleaning my shoes 
S
Biggest hazard: you get drunk, start to think it’d be fun to smear the polish on your face and stage a minstrel show, get beaten to death in a race riot.
It could be based around a concern that the alcohol is a good solvent which will have some skin penetration. If you spilled it on yourself with the shoe polish it could solubilise the hydrophobic components of the polish and give then an entry to your system they otherwise would not have.
I don’t know if this is the case - the alcohol / polish spillage scenario sounds a bit far fetched.
There is a common solvent called dimethylsulfoxide where this sort of behaviour can be very dangerous. It is not so toxic itself, but has tremendous skin penetration and is a fantastic solvent - it will dissolve brickdust. So in the event of spilling it on your hands, there is a risk that it will transport anything it hits on the outside into your system. It should always be handled wearing gloves.
This warning was out in the 70’s in newspaper articles and the like. I don’t remember if this was covered in one of the older Straight Dope books.
Wow!
After all those years in the military spitshining my shoes, licking the blackened handkerchief repeatedly throughout the process :eek: