Listerine (thing)

What's in it

Trace ingredients:

• Eucalyptol .091% Flavoring. It's an aromatic oil extracted from the koala's favorite food.
• Menthol .063% For that minty-fresh cough drop taste.
• Thymol .042% A disinfectant and the reason for the Do Not Swallow label. This is a highly toxic and irritating phenol compound which can be harmful or fatal if swallowed, inhaled, or absorbed through the skin. The oral LD-50 is around 980 mg/kg, so it probably won't kill a normal human, even if he's stupid enough to drink an entire bottle of Listerine.

Other ingredients:

• Benzoic acid and sodium benzoate. These are preservatives.
• Alcohol. Good old ethanol, a decent disinfectant and the most popular drug in the world.
• Poloxamer A surfactant. It's used to disperse the flavoring oils into the water base. It has no known harmful side effects.
• Methyl salicylate., also known as oil of wintergreen. This stuff is the "hot" part of Icy Hot, and it's highly toxic.
• Coloring. The reader may bloody well guess what this does.
• Dihydrogen monoxide.

So... yeah. It is a powerful antiseptic and you can use it to clean cuts in a pinch, as Dr. Lister did. You don't want to swallow some of the ingredients, especially thymol and methyl salicylate, but take comfort in the fact that drinking the stuff probably won't kill you. It can, however, make you violently sick.

A few sources:

http://ptcl.chem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/TH/thymol.html
http://www.who.int/pcs/cicad/summaries/cicad_26.htm#english
http://www.tomsofmaine.com/toms/ifs/poloxamer_335.asp
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002683.htm
A bottle of the stuff in my bathroom.

Constructive criticism is welcome, as always.