I posted the following: "I am trying to make a shower gel that has a scent but is not toxic to either humans or aquatic life. And I have a hard time finding anything for the latter. Essential oils and derivatives? Nope. Synthetic ones? Nothing. I could go the unscented route, but it’s going to be hard to sell. So, considering that most of you are better informed about this topic, is there a specific ingredient that I can use for a rose fragrance that’s truly non toxic? Thanks "
On fragrange, zerowaste and sustainability. The post got deleted by mods in a manner of minutes. What the hell is going on there? I am going to stay here for much longer since that place is turning very weird. Also, can anyone here actually help me find a fragrance ingredient that won’t kill aquatic life when poured down the drain? Thank you in advance
It’s all just bots masturbating other bots over there.
30 years ago I expected this, but thought it was going to be sexier.
The future fucking blows.
The future fucking blows.
Based on your comment that’s exactly what it’s not doing lol
Loving the reddit hate train here but to answer your question, there doesn’t appear to be any non aqua toxic rose fragrances. Even rose water can be aqua toxic. This is due to the fact that geraniol (the compound primarily responsible for a roses’ scent) is acutely toxic to aquatic life. Have you considered other light, floral scents OP?
If you have ever posted something vaguely critical of Trump, Elmo or nazis in another sub, then you may well have bots automatically remove your posts and comments on other subs
It turns out that there are plenty of people who are perfectly OK with nazis across many subreddits out there
Reddit has gone to shit
I wasn’t vaguely critical, but very clearly critical. Although I doubt it had an effect on r/ fragrance, but who knows…
You’d be surprised…
It’s definitely that. I have had the “honor” of being IP banned for over a year. Any accounts associated with my ip (and there were quite a few) were nuked. I never posted anything worse than run of the mill criticism like I do here on Lemmy but I never kissed any mods’ rings either.
We left Reddit because of the drama. Dont bring it over here. Instead, just place your question on lemmy
On fragrange, zerowaste and sustainability.
/r/soapmaking might have some advice. There is a lemmy equivalent !soapmaking@sh.itjust.works but it doesn’t look very active.
The post got deleted by mods in a manner of minutes.
I’ve always struggled with Reddit’s arcane rules. I rarely know why my stuff is deleted. shrugs I don’t really post there anymore, just lurk.
In general, Reddit has made the move that all big name old social media have made (except maybe like Snapchat? I can’t think of any other exceptions) and kowtowed to corporate advertiser money, rightwing misinformation and bigotry, and the egos of oligarchs such as Elon Musk. This is essentially done to make the fat cats in the corporation richer.
I was able to find your deleted Reddit post [EDIT: understanding now that you were referring to posts across multiple subs]. My best good faith guess [for r/frangrance] is that the mods may have considered it to be within the scope of the “No medical advice or health questions” sub rule? Navigating to even find the sub rules was difficult since the mods have attached them via a link that immediately redirects to an account sign-up page. My workaround to even read the rules was to copy the link and change the “www” to “old” and it worked.
[EDIT, continued: For r/zerowaste, the only good faith issue I can see — and it’s a stretch — is the verb tense of “[Crafting] Posts must be something that you have made yourself.” Since you haven’t yet made the fragrance in full, maybe they don’t allow WIPs or for others to help with WIPs?
I don’t see anything with r/sustainability’s rules that would apply. They do have a “No Surveys” rule but there are other posts that do solicit input and advice, so that apparently doesn’t apply to your post.]
You might find Lemmings who are happy to help with your fragrance situation on any of these communities:
https://lemmy.world/c/askscience
I suppose this could be the case , although a strange decision to limit the discussion only on the smell aspect. You should be able to talk about ingredients. Anyway, like I said, il stick around here more. Thank you for the links, I will definitely check them out.
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Reddit is being moderated by an AI now
Just look at the subscriber count of those subreddits. Try to moderate that.
Yup, just get the hell off Reddit. And Twitter. Both of those cess pools.
I deleted my Reddit account of, was it 11 years? More? Anyway, sometimes I miss being able to comment there whenever I come across someone kind, or some idiot. But then I think, boy, morally, I feel better not partaking. Lemmy is the future for now. I’ll abstain from the cancer.
X is where people I want to follow post unfortunately. If they posted on mastodon, I would use that more. As it stands, a lot of people and creators I want to keep up with are only on a few select platforms at the moment. Maybe that’ll change in time but I doubt anytime soon. Same situation with YouTube, I’d like to stop using that too but it’s the only place to find certain things (small example: individual magicians who sometimes perform on Penn & Teller also post their own videos on YT only.)
Understandable.
You go where you need to go sometimes. I don’t follow anyone on Reddit or Twitter that I can’t abstain from or get similar content. I guess I’m lucky.
This is one small example, but I get notifications on developer livestreams for new models and new API updates and feature releases. The OpenAI sub itself is not only too many hours late in publishing any of them, but it’s also only a fraction of the updates coming directly from the company itself. This extends to many other orgs and people I follow.
I’m a developer so I like to have quick access to new info to many frameworks and languages (and other lead devs that post updates.)
When people post on X I complete lose the urge to follow them. If you support X you’re complicit.
That’s wild, I would not be able to keep up with trends in the industry I work in as much if I isolated myself from everyone. But happy it works for you.
I was making the most innocuous comments in Reddit and getting banned. I finally gave up and here I am. #RedditRefugee
I think some mods are overly jumpy with chemistry type questions because uninformed morons will confidently answer the wrong thing and the mods are afraid it will get someone hurt. That or the subs in question just aren’t geared for this kind of Q&A. You’d probably get better responses from a chemistry subreddit.
Scent compounds being potentially hazardous to some minor degree in their super concentrated form isn’t a huge issue, because that’s not how they’re going to be experienced and it’s hard to find anything that isn’t harmful in some quantity. The alchemist Paracelsus, who pioneered evidence backed approaches to pharmaceutical medicine wrote the old adage “The dose makes the poison.” Even water can kill you if you drink too much of it all at once, and pure oxygen is an extremely dangerous substance even though we need it to breathe.
That said, I happen to know a bit about chemistry and just did a bit of reading. It looks like rose oil comes in two forms - one produced by steam distillation, and one produced by solvent extraction. The one produced via solvent extraction is more common, more concentrated, and according to Safety Data Sheets (SDS) I was able to find, has more potential health hazards associated with it. The other form, known as Rose Otto, is produced via steam distillation and is less concentrated. This means you will need more and will need to adjust your formulation, but according to the SDS this is a pretty safe substance. If your concern is potential hazards of making your soap during manufacturing, then that may be a better option I guess. I still think that it’s fine to use substances that are toxic in quantities that will never make it into the final product.
Reddit doesn’t need you. Use to be a place for small communities to collaborate. Now its focusing all it’s efforts on being a proprietor and distributor of information. Any function those small communities serve is not important anymore because their user base is so large and entrenched the only thing that can sink them is gross mismanagement. As we saw with Twitter, even then, the road to broke is long and spiraling.
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Unfortunately, the essential oils, as well as the rose water and distillate are toxic to aquatic life when poured down the drain (as the case for shower gel). These are not harmful for humans, as long as it stays on clothes, skin, etc. That’s what I found with pretty much all available products when checking the FDS / MSDS.
The SDS will be for the oil itself, not at the final concentration used in the shampoo or whatever.
Are you sure the final product is at a toxic concentration? Probably the detergent itself is more dangerous as used. That’s just a guess though.
I really get what you’re saying and obviously I intended to use a small amount to get a nice fragrance. But if enough people are going to use the product, then it can become problematic. Can I sell it then with a straight face as a truly eco friendly product? I dont think so…
Everyone who uses it will contribute to the dilution. It’s not like 1:1000 dilution from a single person’s shower becomes 1:100 if 10 people use it or 1:1 for a thousand. No, they each will use large amounts of water that dilute it down.
People don’t pour their soap down the sink (at least not for any normal uses); they use a small amount which gets washed away with a lot more water.
I’d suggest finding what concentration things are dangerous at and whether they break down organically or not. Then you can aim to keep your product below that concentration if you can so even if someone did pour it down the drain it wouldn’t be harmful. And if you confirm it will break down, you know you aren’t contributing to long-term build up either.
are toxic to aquatic life when poured down the drain
When they’re used in cleaning concentrations, are they that harmful? I see commercial products with them, so they can’t be super terrible. Drain water still has to go thru municipal water systems before it’s released back into nature.
I think they are harmful. Although I am not sure to what extent. What worries me is making a product that gets popular and enough people use it to make a (negative) impact on the environment if I don’t carefully choose the ingredients.
It’s a good concern, but it’s not a “right-now” problem. It shouldn’t stop you from doing your thing, until it’s a real problem. It’s not urgent. When it becomes a problem, you likely will have more resources to solve it.
Make your own rose water from locally obtained rose petals. All rose petals are eventually going to fall on the ground and decay. Any toxic compounds in the rose petals are going to end up released into the environment and washed into the watershed eventually. If you use them for bath soap, you’re just temporarily using them in the path they would already take if left to their own devices. If anything, you’re decreasing the contamination to the environment, as anything that goes down your shower drain will be filtered by the municipal water treatment plant before being released into the watershed.
Since so much is harmful, you might want to go the opposite route. What is not harmful to aquatic life? Is there anything with a nice smell?
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find anything that’s fragrant and fully non toxic. There are bio, eco and vegan claims, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be toxic…
Have you tried aquatic plants? Some of them must have a smell when taken out. That might be fun to check them out.
I don’t know if there are any pleasantly fragrant aquatic plants. I will check it out, this is a neat idea.
I hope something works out for you.
I actually checked a few options and anything fragrant is outside the water for pollinators, which makes sense. I also did check essential oils from water lilies and still hazardous to water life… the search continues.
In what concentration? The SDS is an essential tool, but you need to be able to interpret it. Almost any chemical you look at is going to have an LC50 or EC50 and some kind of data on toxicity to aquatic life. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s so toxic it should never enter the water stream, it just means it shouldn’t be put into water sources in high concentrations.
Looking at a basic ‘geranium oil’ SDS, it’s mostly Citronellol, Geraniol, and Linalool, with miniscule amounts of a handful of others. That is probably not the best environmentally. Since Linalool and Citronellol are both antimicrobial and antifungal agents they absolutely will be somewhat harmful to aquatic life, though probably not significantly in the quantities you’d be using for shower gel.
That said, looking at Linalool, the more “toxic” component, the most sensitive subject is water fleas, with an EC50 of 20mg/L over 48hours. That means 50% of water fleas living in a medium of 20mg/L Linalool for 48 experienced harmful effects from the substance.
So, I searched a random shower gel recipe and got a basic starting point let’s say we’re going to use 7 drops of rose oil in 7 oz of liquid soap (and whatever other stuff). So that’s one drop per oz, using a rough estimate (0.05ml/drop) that gives us a concentration of 0.169% or 1.69 mL/L in your soap. A mL of liquid typically weighs roughly a gram (very roughly, but we’re just looking for a general ballpark here). Linalool makes up about 8% of the rose oil, so your overall Linalool concentration ends up roughly 135mg/L. So, the straight gel would definitely be harmful to aquatic life. But it’s not going into the water system straight, it’s mixed with the water used for bathing. Let’s say you use an entire oz of soap for a shower, and we’ve got a short shower using only 10 gallons of water. So one Oz of gel has 3.9mg of Linalool diluted into 37.8 liters of water, making a concentration around 0.1 mg/L. That’s not much, and that’s just going into more water to be diluted further.
It’s your creation, and it’s up to you to determine what level of potential harm you’re comfortable with, but moreso I hope this helps you understand better what the SDS really means and how to interpret it.
The dose makes the poison. Anything in high enough concentrations causes problems. Essential oils are distilled from the plant and SUPER concentrated.
More commonplace than you think.
