Last year, I wrote a blog post about finding this little treasure, a bottle of Star Wars: The Mandalorian hand sanitizer. Which I thought was kind of cute.
I mean, you get your hands clean, and you’ve got the cute little image of Grogu / The Child / Baby Yoda on the package.
That was, until one of my readers sent me a private message about the hand sanitizer. Which I’m posting here.
“The Baby Yoda hand sanitizers you wrote about have excess levels of Benzene, a carcinogen that is linked to blood cancers such as leukemia. If you have these Baby Yoda hand sanitizers, discontinue use and discard them immediately!”
Now I could equate this as some sort of “The Sky is Falling” issue … except he then provided a link to some sort of legal bulletin petition that denoted the amount of chemicals used in hand sanitizers, as well as whether they were safe for underage use – or possibly accidental consumption.
Here’s the link, if you want to scroll through pages of legalese.
Yeah, I don’t know. Right now we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, and watching your hands is one of the ways to keep germs at bay. Whether you use soap or hand sanitizer, whatever works for you.
Obviously, you use it on your hands, you don’t ingest it. It’s still a product that has certain safety requirements and precautions.
So I would say, rather than discontinue the use of hand sanitizers, look at the label and be careful with what you use. Use it only for the intended purpose, don’t start experimenting with different ideas or techniques or mashups.
Meanwhile, I’ll still wash my hands with soap and water, and with hand sanitizer when I feel it’s necessary.
But maybe I’ll switch to Purell, and keep what’s left of my Mandalorian hand sanitizer in the bathroom medicine chest.
You know … the place where everybody puts their medicines that they don’t normally use all the time.
This is the way.
Chuck The Writer 
This is the way
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I wouldn’t worry about it. The dose makes the poison, and in fact if you rub your hands with pure benzene every day it won’t hurt you – unless you do it for a couple of hundred years. Honestly there are far more dangerous things out there. Health Canada has ordered the recall of several sanitizers because they are either mislabled (not necessarily dangerous) or contain high levels of ethanol (industrial strength). Still won’t kill you under normal use. But I’m sure lawyers are quick to say otherwise.
I’ve got some standard hand cleaner here that I am loathed to use because I react to it. That is an individual thing, and doesn’t warrant the product being removed from sale. A lawyer would say otherwise. Nothing is 100% safe, and everything is about odds not certainties.
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