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Make your own hand sanitiser (WHO recipe): https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf

Buy 95% ethanol (from hardware/paint department, or maybe Everclear booze if in US) or isopropyl alcohol (hardware/paint department).

Buy Glycerin (Chemist, or I found it cheap at Indian goods store, probably other places).

IMHO the Hydrogen peroxide can be safely skipped if you can’t easily find it.

Maybe also get some hand cream (frequent use of hand sanitiser will screw your skin).

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Oh thanks for the link. I was looking around to source food/cosmetics-grade carbopol 941, Caprylyl Glycol, AMP or high-purity TEA, and Isopropyl Myristate per a chemistry formulation forum. I was going to cost $500 or so to get started making even small quantities, and then everclear and distilled water for the balance.

Oh man... without very careful fractional distillation, random Home Depot paint thinner, fireplace fuel isn't a good idea at all. For use on hands, it must be food or cosmetics grade.

Maybe some aloe vera would be better than hand cream, which would leave less of an unpleasant, oily residue? Also, random hand cream would likely interact with the recipe because they usually include many components.

Please don't get too crazy if you're not a chemist.

If the stuff is clearly labelled ethanol, for cleaning/burning, made from biological sources, you can be pretty sure it's just simple continuous distilled sugar-based (likely via yeast) reasonably high-purity ethanol with mandated-by-law denaturation additives (over here in Germany that'd be ~1% methyl-ethyl-ketone and a hint of denatonium benzoate) to make it taste too bad for people to get drunk from it.

This is far from random paint thinner or random mineral-oil-based lighter fluid/accelerant.

For use on your hands the normal home and garden ethanol is sufficiently harmless, and will itself do more damage than any residues. After all, it's made for use in situations where most people don't wear gloves.

Sorry, wrong... you're making a big leap of assumption rather than understanding what grades mean. If it's not food / cosmetics grade, you have no idea what toxic impurities are left in it... that's why the fuel-kind is cheap and for burning, not placing on your hands. Unless you have a decent mass spectrometer, you can feel free to gamble with your and your own family's health and/or lives.

I might be have made wrong assumptions about consumer safety regulations where you are. I'm pretty sure you can't sell anything in Germany to consumers that's toxic on contact with hands if it's something people usually touch and you don't warn about it.

The reason the fuel-type is this cheap is that it's taxed much less than the drinking kind. For technical applications they have good reason to keep if clean, safe for traces of impurities. The stuff they use for non-medical hand sanitizer and such should come from the same factory. There isn't much you can do wrong when producing industrial quantities of generic technical ethanol.

I'm sorry if I caused confusion though.

As someone who has drums of anhydrous solvent and glycerin at their workplace this guide is actually helpful.

Put some aloe vera in that cauldron, or your skin's oils will be stripped off like paint and then viruses, fungi and bacteria will move in to their new home.

When I found that the hand sanitizer was totally cleaned out this is what I did since isopropyl alcohol was still available and cheap. Maybe if things continue to get bad some of our E85 fuel production can be leave the gasoline off and offer pure ethanol for hand sanitizer, but we'll have to prevent people from drinking it.

They figured out how to prevent people from drinking it in the 1920's.

Denaturing and/or adulterants (bitterants). These or the alcohol could be distilled off.

Those agents are not something you'd want to put on your skin, is my point.

> ethanol (from hardware/paint department...)

Be careful with this. I checked the denatured alcohol available in the paint section of Home Depot and it said it may contain methanol. Everclear does seem like the next best thing after isopropyl, if it's available in your state.

Yes - most ethanol is denatured by adding a small quantity of methanol, which renders it undrinkable. They also sometimes add a bitter compound to discourage drinking or a colour to identify it as non-drinkable.

If you can get cheap high-proof food-grade ethanol that would be best, as methanol can be absorbed through the skin. You could also re-distill the ethanol (may not be legal in your jurisdiction), or find the MSDS to figure out the methanol range.

Nice. Thanks for the recipe.

Now, I can package my own brand, and sell it on the intersection, across from the guy selling a $5 bag of oranges.

$100/bottle of Fresh Dreams Hand Sanitizer

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