Kerosene as an additive

brujacoden

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Apr 24, 2023
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I work in diesel-adjacent industry and as such, one line of soaps I'm always interested in improving for myself and people like me is mechanic's soap. Abrasives I have on lock just from cribbing notes from major soap brands past and present in my region, but I find my degreasers (primarily limonene) fall short for the gunks and cruds I'm exposed to on a daily basis. I've been looking at alternatives and much to my surprise it seems that kerosene and turpentine are on the table for purpose-built degreasing soaps.

So has anyone here had a crack at that? I've been exposed to enough kero that the smell really doesn't phase me, and for a pretty penny more I can get stuff with extra aromatics burned off or extracted some other way, so I don't suppose that will be much of an issue for my target audience... I'm mainly interested in how much of a horror-show it'll be to work with in a physical sense, acceleration, curdling, weird reactions with other common ingredients sort of thing.

Bonus points for anyone who has actually used a kerosene soap in their day-to-day! And I'll probably have to put an extra "Don't rub it in your eyes/smoke it/eat it" label on the packaging, but if it takes my bars from OK to Great then I reckon that's perfectly fine.

Woah, now that I'm thinking about it... what about going the whole hair of the dog and sticking a bit of ethanol-contaminated petrol in there? Might be difficult to track down an INCI name for that. And then I'd need to add a "don't inhale" warning as well. But the fragrance would be covered! :p
 

DanielAshery

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Apr 23, 2023
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No experience here but I came across "The Modern Soap and Detergent Industry, Including Glycerol Manufacture" by Geoffrey Martin, 1925 while trying to find an old Naphthalene soap recipe (yeah, we don't sell Naphthalene to consumers here in the States anymore)... there's a few chapters on "hydrocarbon containing soaps" which might give you a few ideas. It's mostly chlorinated compounds, which we really don't sell to consumers either, but they're available industrially.

 

brujacoden

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Apr 24, 2023
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Excellent, this might help indeed. Wondering if I want to try and get a physical copy. Volume 3's available on archive.org and it has the full index pointing me to Volume 2 which doesn't appear to be terribly abundant, but this is a great place to start. Thanks very much!

Below appears to be the full text (of Volume 3 only) available at archive.org for anyone else who is interested
 
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