Also be aware that a LOT of companies substitute cheaper ingredients in their food products. Which is obnoxious but fine, unless you’re allergic to the substitute ingredients.
Olive oil, tea, honey, cinnamon (not that lead is exactly “safe” to eat), vanilla, coffee, fish, blah blah blah. The list goes on. Any corners a company can cut to save .001%, they will. Usually the substitutes are mostly harmless, but it isn’t as if companies care about consumer safety when there’s profit to be made.
To clarify, the list linked is ALL hand sanitizer products officially recalled (and may have ongoing additions). It is NOT just the Aruba Aloe brand; there are many brands by various manufacturers on the list. So please check to see if you own anything on that list.
To clarify further and reduce overall panic: methanol isn’t that bad if you get it on your skin. It causes blindness when you ingest it because your liver tries to break it down like ethanol (as in, sippin’ liquor) and accidentally creates formic acid, which dissolves your optic nerve.
Interestingly, one of the best ways to prevent methanol toxicity if medical treatment is unavailable is to just drink a fuck load of ethanol (i.e. get shitfaced) because your liver is like “oh, shit, now THERE’S the good stuff!” and just kinda ignores the methanol for a while until you pee it out. This also works if you are a complete moron and you drink antifreeze, but through a different mechanism that keeps the antifreeze in solution instead of allowing it to crystallize inside your kidneys. If methanol gets on your skin (like from windshield washer fluid, where it’s used to lower the freezing point of the liquid below temperatures typically found on this planet), it evaporates even faster than ethanol or isopropanol, so the odds of absorbing a toxic amount from a little squirt of hand sanitizer are pretty low.
Just don’t fucking drink your hand sanitizer or slather your entire body with it a la Frank Reynolds and you’ll be fine.
