- Joined
- May 6, 2011
- Messages
- 650
This video is total bunk, clearly demonstrates Tecnu is no better than dish soap at removing axel grease, which has very little to do with urushiol despite what the author of the video desperately wants to believe...
FTFY
Technu is some of the best preventative medicine out there. My company has gone back and forth between issuing Technu and 2 different types of poison ivy wipes (one preventative, one for after exposure) called Ivy-X to people who are exposed to poison plants. My evidence is anecdotal, but the two summers I had access to Technu I never had poison ivy, the summer I had to use the IvyX wipes I had it 3 times (twice after I began using the preventative treatment every morning). I'm not saying the Ivy X was bad, because I was definitely exposed more than 3 times that summer, but if you follow directions, Technu works as advertised.
The intermolecular attractions in both urushiol and axle grease (hydrocarbons) are the key to addressing these questions. Intermolecular attractions are what mainly controls the solubility properties of materials, at the molecular level. With urushiol and axle grease, its mostly van der waals interactions between long chain hydrocarbons. Therefore their solubility properties are almost the same, although urushiol may be slightly more water soluble (and more easily washed from skin) due to the phenolic hydroxyl groups and their propensity to hydrogen bond with water.
So, axle grease actually turns out to be a very good visible mimic of urushiol, and actually HARDER to remove from the skin than urushiol. Dish soap does the job. The video does a nice job illustrating this.
Thanks for the anecdotes from your company. I believe your company lacks organic chemistry expertise, and rather than really understanding the science behind it, instead is relying on marketing and guesswork, which puts you at risk. The experiments they did on you with wipes vs technu are a specific example of that.
Technu probably works OK, but soap is a LOT cheaper and just as effective if not moreso.