These are the three acids that I'm going to be pouring on my hand, from left to right, we have muriatic acid, sulfuric acid and nitric acid I choose these three acids because they're the most commonly used ones in the lab The question that I imagine a lot of you are thinking is: Why would somebody purposely pour acid onto their hand? I could in fact just be crazy and stupid, or I could have a logical reasoning The main reason is to show the effects of these acids have when you get them on your skin, and to show that you really should not freak out For acids like these and many other types of acids, damage to the skin requires prolonged exposure As long as the acid is washed off in a reasonable amount of time after it gets onto your skin, there really isn't much to worry about The second reason is a little bit more abstract, and it's to illustrate how chemicals have different reaction with different things In general, the reaction that occurs between two chemicals is very specific to the chemicals that are involved Just because something has a violent or scary reaction with one thing, it doesn't mean that it will have the same reaction with everything This point we further elaborated on as we go through the video Before we start, I really want to have a disclaimer and state there's a very big difference between corrosive chemicals and poisonous chemicals The acids that I've chosen and a lot of other acids in general are simply corrosive and they're not poisonous When corrosive things get onto your skin, usually if you wash them off in a reasonable amount of time, the worst thing that can happen is some red irritation or some pain With poisonous things like let's say mercury salts or some other things, getting it on your skin is a much bigger deal This is why it's extremely important to know what you're working with before you work with it and to have the proper safety precautions in place Knowing what you're working with and all of the associated risks and dangers is extremely important before you start any project One other point to make is that your skin is not like your eyes If you put acid on your skin, it can regenerate if you get acid in your eyes, you can go blind extremely quickly A major reason why these acids don't hurt your skin very much is due to the dead skin layer and you do not have this on your eyes and they'll be severely damaged So that being said, I'm going to get started and we'll start with muriatic acid, also known as hydrochloric acid So here we have some 31.45 percent hydrochloric acid that I bought from the store To start off, I pour a little bit into a beaker I added a beaker and I play some aluminum foil inside and then on top of this, I'm pouring some of the acid I did this for two main reasons: A. To show the violent reaction that it has with aluminum and B. To show you that it actually is acid that I'm pouring onto my hand One thing that didn't occur to me was that aluminum has a thick oxide layer on its surface which protects it from the acid, so it takes a little bit of time for the reaction to start However you can see that the moment it started bubbling, the reaction took off pretty quickly I also purposely did this in one shot and kept my hand inside the frame the whole time, so that people wouldn't claim that I swapped out the beaker for water or something Anyway, once everything is reacted, I figure I'm done with it and then move it to the side I then decide that my left hand is the victim and I start pouring the acid onto it For no comments, I'm double-jointed and I'm also well aware that my hands are not exactly beautiful I definitely do not qualify to be a hand model and pouring acid on them really isn't going to make them any uglier From the moment that the acid touches my skin, I start the timer and I'm going to hold it here as long as I can until I start feeling a little bit of pain The moment I start to feel a little bit of sting, I will remove my hand and rinse it in some water You see I really felt nothing, so I started even giving my hand a little bath in the acid After this bath, though it started stinging a little and I decided to wash it off So in total, I had the acid on my hand for about 50 seconds After washing it off, it wasn't red or anything at all and I figured I'd move on to the next acid And now for the scarier acid which is concentrated sulfuric acid, and here's a quick demonstration, I pour a little bit onto some paper towel Can see that it pretty quickly reacts with the paper and dissolves it I didn't hold it here for long enough, but it would only take something like 10 seconds to fully dissolve through a few layers of paper So with this demonstration done, I move on to pouring some of it onto my hand Before I do this, I apologize for the poor angle and also for my sloppy pouring I honestly have no idea why I poured like this or why I was so sloppy, but unfortunately this is one of those things that you can only do one take up In either case, I still pour a bunch on my hand and the effect will still be seen I honestly thought that it was gonna burn pretty quickly and that's why I put my bucket of water right next to it, but it honestly wasn't that fast I wash my hands up immediately the moment I got a slight sensation of burning After washing it off like you see here, you know scrubbing and making sure that there's no acid left over, there was absolutely no pain So I was very surprised to see that I could hold it on my hand for something like 25 and a half seconds, and feel absolutely nothing This is the aftermath after I wash my hands and you can see the damage that the acid did What's interesting is that these aren't burns, they're just really dry skin like if you leave a wet bandaid on for a day Sulfuric acid loves taking and holding onto water, so the moment it touches your skin, it immedieately pulls the water out When water and sulfuric acid mix, it's exothermic and produces heat, so this is why when sulfuric acid touches your skin, it actually feels slightly warm This is what my hand looked like about three hours later after I put some moisturizer on it You can see there's no real damage and it just looks like wrinkly dry skin, and just to show that there's no pain at all I hit it a few times I also compare my left hand which got the acid on it to my right hand so you can see the difference So now on to the last acid, which actually turned out to be the worst of them all which kind of surprised me So into a beaker I pour in a little bit of concentrated commercial-grade nitric acid My demonstration for this one is the reaction between nitric acid and copper Nitric acid will react quickly and very vigorously with copper It will produce a green copper nitrate solution and it will also produce a lot of red nitrogen dioxide gas For this part of the demonstration, I had to wear a good respirator because nitrogen dioxide gas is actually quite toxic My foolish mistake was pouring out the contents of the beaker, and allowing the penny to continue to react while I do the demonstration This produced a crazy amount of nitrogen dioxide gas and was really unnecessary Anyway, I get to pouring the nitric acid onto my hand Unlike the other runs, this is the shortest amount of time I was able to hold it on my hand So it's less than half the duration of the sulfuric acid run and I held it for only about 12 seconds Also, unlike the other times, the stinging and the pain ramped up quite quickly instead of being very slow and gradual Whereas with the nitric acid, I really felt it attacking I think this is actually for two major reasons: The first being the obvious, my hand was already assaulted by acid twice earlier in the day and the second reason being that nitric acid actually reacts with your skin It reacts with the protein in your skin called keratin, which is what gives your skin its elasticity and its strength and its ability to repel water I think this factor and the exposure to the other acids compromise my dead skin layer and allowed the nitric acid to penetrate deeper This is my hand and you see that's a little bit red but there's a lot of yellow As I said before, the nitric acid reacts with keratin in your skin, and when it does this, it turns into yellow This effect though is mostly just superficial I read online that when these things were neutralized, they go from a yellow color to more of an orange color So I couldn't really resist testing this out and I soak my hand in a saturated solution of baking soda When I took my hand out, it actually did look like some of the stains turned orange, there's still a lot of yellow, but I could definitely see a little bit of orange This is the aftermath and it shows what my hand looks like about a week or a week and a half later Basically, there's no real damage to my hand, it's all so superficial and all of the skin that the nitric acid destroyed just flakes off My hand looked horrible and diseased from all the skin that was flaking off, but by now everything looks perfectly fine So you can see here's a shot of what my hand looks like now, which is about a few weeks after I did this It pretty much looks exactly the same as the hand that didn't get the acid, because by now all of the dead skin has had time to fall off So in this video you saw me put three different common acids onto my hand I really want to illustrate the stark difference that theese acids had when reacting with let's say... the aluminum, the paper or the copper, versus my hand These things had violent or scary reactions almost immediately, whereas with my hand, it didn't really seem like much of anything was happening This is the nature of chemicals and chemical reactions in general, where the reaction is extremely dependent on what is actually present Just because something violent reacts with one thing, you can't just assume it's going to violently react with everything because as you can see here that's cleary not the case On the flip side though, just because something appears to not react violently with something, it doesn't mean it's going to be safe with everything For this reason, you should always wear gloves and always take the proper safety precautions because you don't know everything Although accidents do happen and you will probably end up with a little bit of blister on your skin and I hope this video shows you that you really don't need to freak out and you just need to wash it off as soon as possible I would imagine that the average response time is several seconds, not 20 or 50 like I had here Anyway, that's it for now, I hope my point was semi-clear in this video because I know it might have been a little bit convoluted That being said, don't extrapolate the conclusion of this video to every single acid As a side note in this video, I only used strong acids, but a weak acid could potentially actually damage my skin more The terms weak and strong only referred to its hydrolisis in water, and not to how damaging it could be when it gets on your skin Again, here's a list of the videos that I'm currently editing and future videos I plan to film In the video's being edited category, you can vote for the one that you want me to publish next and in the future video category, you can vote for the one that you want me to film next Also, if you're feeling generous, please donate to my Patreon account because with a bigger budget per video, I can do more things Also, instead of stockpiling videos, I've decided I'm going to publish them as soon as I edit them so in the next month or so, there's going to be a lot of videos coming out On my Patreon, I also added a milestone and if we get to two hundred and fifty dollars per video, I'll commit to doing videos for at least six months
I'm really excited to see his hydrofluoric acid video. To be absolutely clear, no one should ever do this with hydrofluoric acid.
Yeah it really depends on the contact time. I work with all of these regularly and would agree you can have contact with highly concentrated acids for short periods of time without notable consequence. However, even much weaker chemicals can leave a lasting impression with more time or if they undergo a reaction. I have permanent scars from solvents. There was no pain, I didn't notice the little splatter from the pipet, but now I have a brown spot on my hand that's been there for 3 yrs now.
That muriatic acid is an HCl solution and is not concentrated. It is ~10M, while concentrated HCl is 12.1M. That is actually a big difference.
This is really shitty advice. A lot depends on the molarity of the acid. In any case, it is beyond irresponsible to not practice proper safety when working with chemicals.
He says he's "surprised" by the reaction of the third one.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think "surprise" is a good emotion to have while working with dangerous chemicals.
So let me get this straight. I can't pour acid in my eyes?
So in those awful acid attacks against women, what acid are they using? Because those seem to be instant disfigurement and burning
In highschool chemistry class, a bully decided to drip some kind of acid on my neck. By the end of the period, I felt some minor stinging, but I thought I'd been bitten by something. I even asked the teacher, who agreed that it was a bug bite, and sent me to the nurse to get some benadryl.
By the end of the day, the section of skin was quite irritated and raw. A matching section on the hoodie I was wearing had gone from dark blue to orange. I've still got a 1/2cm scar from that, about 6 years ago.
The police picked up the kid the next day, he got some kind of assault charge.
This is your hand on acid.