Interesting, I looked up the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for D-Lead Hand Soap, because I'm into that kind of thing, and because they often tell the ingredients of the product. If found two MSDSs, one from back in 2011 when the ingredient was a chemical called sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate, which is a detergent in the same class as what one might find in dish soap or cheap shampoo.
Chemists help me out here, does the benzene part help it better disperse electron dense stuff like metal dusts?
Anyway, by 2024 they changed the recipe to different chemicals,
a chelator
a detergent
and a little antibacterial disinfectant
all in a goopy salt water carrier.
The chelator sounds like a good idea, something that can bind to metal bits and maybe clump metal dust, like a molecular kitty litter. But I was looking up the tests for lead, how they work, and many of the less expensive and thus more common lead tests, the swabs or wipes, use some chemistry to react with the lead and change color to indicate lead is present.
So my question is, if a chelator binds lead, will it still react with such a lead test kit? If one cleans up using a product with chelator, might one then get a false negative measurement with the test kit, showing no lead even when some is still there, but bound to chelator?
This paper describes the indicator chemical in the pink or purple test kits, Rhodizonate, itself a chelator that changes color when bound to heavy metals, and how that is inhibited by other common chelators
(page 2)
And I don't mean that D-Lead is a bad product, it sounds like a great soap for washing off lead. I got this bug in my brain about chelators and lead tests when I heard about another product, tactical grit or something like that, which is advertised as waterless, just wipe on, rub hands and you're good to go. Their video showed a lead test wipe as being negative for lead after using the product, but without actually rinsing anything off I had to wonder if the lead was really gone or just masked by the product.
...yikes!
