So the other day, I was in a store and they sold a little bit of metal, claiming claiming that it removes stinks from garlic, fish, shrimp ASF. just rub your fingers on it. Yeah right, me thinks. But then, yesterday, I saw a similar product: “Stainless steel soap” - "You never have to buy another soap again. Soap shaped, sort of, with a brush on one side and the steel on the other.
How does this work? Does it work? Is it yet another “Amazing Product” as advertised on infomercials.
I tried googling, but came up with gazillion hits for soap dishes and dispensers in stainless steel.
Well that’s the thing. It was shaped as a bar of soap. Presumably something to take to the shower and… well rub yourself… So maybe it’s just some marketing genius who think that “removes smell” = clean.
I had forgotten about Cecil’s column, though. But he doesn’t say why it removes smell.
Before you run out and pay too much money for a hunk of stainless steel take a look at your sink. If it’s stainless steel you can just rub your hands on it to remove the smells.
Something a lot of cooks and homemakers figured out on their own a long time ago. Another good reason to have a stainless steel kitchen sink.
I am not an electrical engineer but as I was told by an electrical engineer, “We know how electicity behaves, we know how to manipulate it, but we really don’t know what it is.”
Re the nature of “electricity” it’s really less an issue of true ignorance about electricity and and more one of technical semantics What Is “Electricity”?
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The effect has been documented by Cecil and by Consumer Reports. You can use any piece of stainless steel. It’s not simple abrasion. You can’t get the same odor removal by rubbing your hands on a polyester scrub pad such as Scotchbrite™. It’s not a soap substitute, either. If your hands are greasy, or you’ve been working in the garden, and you rub your hands on stainless steel, they’ll still be dirty. They’ll smell better, though.
Well Iron ions are pretty good at flipping the spin on oxygen, and thus reducing the activation energy of oxidation reactions. The ion’s large, soft electronegativity also catalyzes many free radical based mechanisms. Allicin, the primary source of garlic odor, is quite unstable chemically, and likely susceptible to degradation by either iron ions in solution, or iron bound as hydroxyls to the surface of the “stainless steel soap.”
All that tells you is that electrical engineers don’t know what it is. In particle physics, by contrast, it’s just about the only thing that we do know what it is.
(Actually, all the quote shows is that that particular EE doesn’t know. I’m sure there are others who do.)
