Orange You Glad?

One of the best ways to get some science in your life is to always ask, "What's in that?"  From food to fragrance and soap to nuts, asking this question will reveal a lot about what you come in contact with each and every day.

Today's topic:

Orange Cleaners - A Lesson On Origin

By no means am I a chemo-phobe.  I believe every chemical has its place.  Some of them have a place in my food, and others have a place written in a textbook never to come in contact with man, beast, or plant. Understanding the origin, properties, and destination of each chemical helps to make that decision easier.  Not knowing these things can leave you the target of clever marketers and late night infomercials that want you to believe that origin is the difference between good and bad, safe and dangerous.

Here's a great YouTube example...

"It's all natural and made from pure orange oil!" 

Let's dissect that statement for a moment.   

All Natural:

All Natural sounds great.  Something made from nature must be good for you.  It has a soothing ring like Organic (not in the chemical sense) and Sustainable.  It may make you think of a butterfly landing on a delicate orange blossom bathed in the Florida sun. That warm feeling, however, should be chilled by the fact that some of the most toxic substances in the world are All Natural.  Uranium, lead, and arsenic are a few naturally occurring elements.  The family of compounds that makes poison ivy itchy, urshiols, is from nature.  Spider and snake venom are all natural.  In contrast, some of the most useful substances are also from nature.  One of the most effective cancer drugs, taxol, was isolated from the pacific yew tree.  The best smelling fragrances, such as linalool from lavender, are made by nature.  The snake venom I mentioned above might also be beneficial someday.  Yes, oil from oranges can make a good wood-cleaner, but Try Some Science (TSS) is about understanding, not just following warm feelings.  Origin is important, but it doesn't inherently make it good...or bad.

Made from pure orange oil:

Oranges are plants; pure plant extracts are good.  Cleaning with something pure from a plant should be good for us.  We should all clean with turpentine.  If that late night infomercial was selling turpentine, you might be a little hesitant to run to the phone and grab your wallet.  I can see it now, "But wait, call now and you can get two bottles of turpentine, It's all natural and made from pine trees!" Yes, the solvent of Adam Sandler lore is made from pine trees.  It is harvested from some varieties or extracted in the production of paper (this might be a good future TSS topic), but it is a natural product.  Your grandpa may have used it to thin paint or degrease the carburetor, but isn't that essentially what the orange stuff is claiming?  Alright, you know they are different, it isn't just marketing, nobody would use turpentine on their furniture.  Or would they (note pine essential oil)?

Lets Compare:

They are very similar molecules.  Both are hydrocarbons (molecules containing only hydrogen and carbon atoms) and even have the same molecular formula C10H16, which means they have ten carbon and sixteen hydrogen atoms.  They melt and boil at nearly the same temperature and have similar solubility.  If you rub one on a cabinet, water is sure to slide off because they repel each other like oil and water (because they are oil and water!).

Much of this similarity is because they belong to a family of molecules called terpenes.  Terpenes are versatile building blocks for many natural products.  The details of these are too great for this post, but I might revisit that in the future.

Should I use it or not?

Sure! Use it if you want to keep things clean and smelling like oranges.  Keep in mind that it is not orange juice,  raw peel, pulp, or seeds; it is a highly purified and refined flammable oil that happens to come from the skin of oranges.  It does what it is advertised to do because it is an organic (this time in the chemical sense) molecule that contains only carbon and hydrogen and therefore has properties similar to that type of molecule.  Treat it like you would treat turpentine, another flammable oil, and you will be using some science and some common sense.

There are a lot of companies out there marketing these products, this blog is here to help you become an educated consumer. I don't want to advocate for one thing or another, just to help you in your own decision making process.

Take Home Message:

For now, let's say we tried some science and really got to know what was in our All Natural cleaning polish.

Orange you glad you asked?