Me too but I would think OP would know about the staining properties of turmeric if they cook with it, and wouldn't have only noticed after work.
Fuck turmeric though, for being so delicious and healthy and yet staining *anything* it touches in a microsecond.
Nitrile is not recommended for use with nitric. I bet your hands will peel from the nitric that seeped through your gloves. Your glove company should have a little info graphic on their website showing glove recommendations for a whole list of acids. There are generic ones you can easily search on google as well.
Edit: Acetone is also not great with nitrile gloves as someone else pointed out.
Alternatives?
What about some ePTFE coated polychloroprene?
IMO these stains come from accumulating shit in those gloves.
I handeled KMnO4 with bare hands. Dont recommend this! But never had stains.
If there was a hole in the glove or something, i wouldnt even notice.
Sure, this wont apply to most chemicals. But your PPE should be resistant i guess?
sry im 2 days awake
I think staining is pretty likely, they used a salt that's yellow when crude (which is would be when it's precipitated in skin).
Glove stank washes off.
Can confirm as a paramedic working in the SE USA. You want to change gloves alot but RIP trying to get a fresh pair on. I'm a bit curious to know why it happens though - degradation of the nitrile?
It helps fanning your hands with your fingers spread apart, additionally you can put them on as far as they go and blow up the glove like a balloon, then you can usually slip right in.
If you're changing gloves a lot, and I mean a lot, you want to put on 2 pairs.
Don't forget to moisten your hands after every shift.
Do you or anyone else in the lab work with dyes?
Just small traces cleaned up with solvents can already lead to stains... and might also be able to permeate through gloves.
For the fun part: put your hand under an uv-lamp to test if it is fluorescent
Our department began a new inorganic teaching lab a few years ago where students make fluorescent compounds, then the experiment ends with the instructor and TAs shining UV lamps on people’s hands, work space, notebooks, etc just to demonstrate how easily contamination can propagate. It’s a well needed lesson for some of them.
Gah, I hate BODIPY! No offence to your research, but it was my first research experience and it got truly everywhere. The prof ran a summer research “bootcamp” structured like a senior undergrad lab, so he brought in like 9 undergrads and assigned each of them one target dye that would be useful to the PhD students. Every surface in that room would turn green and red, and the base bath was pitch black 😆
Well, the purpose was to link them with conjugates for a kind of trojan horse approach for bacteria intake of modified sugars, with the plan to substitute the dyes with antibiotics.
I don’t have any file I can share on it, but they [make a lanthanide complex similar to these ones](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanthanide_probes#:~:text=Lanthanides%20are%20metal%20ions%20which,lanthanides%20are%20most%20commonly%20used). It’s really easy to prepare and fluoresces quite intensely, so there’s no need to turn out the lights.
This is my bet. Looks like nitric acid reaction on his skin. He was wearing nitrile gloves and they don't hold up well to nitric acid. I bet his skin will peel in the next few days.
Gloves are not universal. Nitrile gloves allow acetone and many other solvents to pass right them. I have seen students have chemicals like nitroaniline dissolved in acetone pass right through their gloves and stain their hands yellow. Just look up "glove chart chemical" on Google or Bing and the images should have a nice chart for appropriate gloves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium_tetrachloride
My guess is some staining from TiCl4, it's yellow when crude, and likely oxidised to a crude TiO2 (a white pigment which I could easily see becoming yellow when crude as well)
Could be a myriad of things, however a better question is "how did it happen"? And "how can I stop this from happening again?
Have you checked your gloves compatibility with the solvents, not all gloves are as resistive to certain things as others, some nitrile gloves will protect you for e.g. 30 minutes not multiple hours. Did you change gloves regularly? You can get microholes in gloves from as little as ~20-30 mins use.
I usually do change them every 30 mins or so, so I'm not sure. But I really think it's got something to do with the nitrile gloves. Could it be acetone spilling too much onto the gloves?
Check the compatibility of nitrile gloves with all the solvents you used.
This is something we have to teach our undergraduate students (and there are some arguments as to whether we should have safe labs but where the student doesn't get to use nitrile gloves) they aren't just some magic barrier that makes you "safe" they can still have very short exposure times of solvents getting through the nitrile rubber.
https://literature.impact-products.com/chemical-resistance-chart-chemres2102/65290997
It's important to be aware of what is safe when.
Assuming it doesn't just wash off, then it's a stain, and I think that's most likely from the titanium chloride.
I used to sell gloves, and this is something people had a hard time understanding, not every glove is good for everything. It was a particularly important point to drive home when working with the chemo lab
Sometimes Nitrile is the way, some it’s butyl. Sometimes vinyl is appropriate and still occasionally latex.
Good manufacturers will print testing on their boxes. And all of those are time dependent. So something might be appropriate, but only for 10 mins, then breakdown/ breakthrough will occur.
Acetone on nitrile has a breakthrough time under 10 minutes. That means it’s safe to use, but if you spill anything you need to change them ASAP.
Best practice is to change gloves immediately if you see anything contaminating them. The contaminant may not seep through on its own, but if you later spill a highly penetrating solvent on those gloves, it’ll redissolve the contamination and *carry it through to your skin*.
I saw you mentioned working with titanium chloride, a lot of crude titanium salts are yellow, the distinct white color tends to come from being finely dispersed. You probably wore the gloves too long in contact with something that permeated through them and got titanium salts on your skin.
I once had yellow/orange fingers after working with para-toluidine, probably not the compound youre looking for but my point is there are many things that could cause this colouring.
Looks like Xanthoprotein-reaction between the nitric acid and aromatic proteins in your skin. Nitrile gloves often get damaged seconds after contact with nitric acid.
Your skin will peel in some days, but that should be all.
Do you work with potassium iodide? It used to stain my hands & clothes yellow all the time. I also know that certain forms of nitric acid react with skin and can turn it yellow.
Turmeric
r/beatmetoit
my first thought too! Amazing lol
Me too but I would think OP would know about the staining properties of turmeric if they cook with it, and wouldn't have only noticed after work. Fuck turmeric though, for being so delicious and healthy and yet staining *anything* it touches in a microsecond.
livuh
Or Goya
Same gloves all day? You sweat a lot? Only idea I can think of
Not the same gloves all day, but I wore one for a prolonged period of time. They were purple nitrile gloves. Could that be the case?
My purple nitrile gloves turn like that and it gets on my hands. I don’t wear lab gloves for that long, but as a janitor, this happens to me a lot.
Man, this seems like it could be it. Maybe its the sweating and all the acetone.
Acetone goes straight through nitrile, probably dissolved some colour and deposited on your hand
Happens to me every single time I wear those crappy purple gloves and wash glassware. It’s horrible, and it lasts more than a week.
Invest in glove liners, will reduce the sweat and discomfort
Nitrile is not recommended for use with nitric. I bet your hands will peel from the nitric that seeped through your gloves. Your glove company should have a little info graphic on their website showing glove recommendations for a whole list of acids. There are generic ones you can easily search on google as well. Edit: Acetone is also not great with nitrile gloves as someone else pointed out.
Alternatives? What about some ePTFE coated polychloroprene? IMO these stains come from accumulating shit in those gloves. I handeled KMnO4 with bare hands. Dont recommend this! But never had stains. If there was a hole in the glove or something, i wouldnt even notice. Sure, this wont apply to most chemicals. But your PPE should be resistant i guess? sry im 2 days awake
It's very bright, somehow I doubt it's just glove stank.
True honestly looks like highlighter. Unless OP doesn’t wash their hands after gloves marinade
I think staining is pretty likely, they used a salt that's yellow when crude (which is would be when it's precipitated in skin). Glove stank washes off.
Can confirm as a paramedic working in the SE USA. You want to change gloves alot but RIP trying to get a fresh pair on. I'm a bit curious to know why it happens though - degradation of the nitrile?
If you can wear thin cottonalls underneath without losing too much dexterity that’ll fix your problem
It helps fanning your hands with your fingers spread apart, additionally you can put them on as far as they go and blow up the glove like a balloon, then you can usually slip right in. If you're changing gloves a lot, and I mean a lot, you want to put on 2 pairs. Don't forget to moisten your hands after every shift.
Yeah this happened to me a lot when I worked in the lab and didn’t change my gloves often enough. My hands would get al sweaty stinky and yellowy
Either gloves or some substances like aniline getting on your skin. I hope it's gloves, or you should be concerned
I think it's aniline. I got the same stains on my fingers due to it.
Do you or anyone else in the lab work with dyes? Just small traces cleaned up with solvents can already lead to stains... and might also be able to permeate through gloves. For the fun part: put your hand under an uv-lamp to test if it is fluorescent
Our department began a new inorganic teaching lab a few years ago where students make fluorescent compounds, then the experiment ends with the instructor and TAs shining UV lamps on people’s hands, work space, notebooks, etc just to demonstrate how easily contamination can propagate. It’s a well needed lesson for some of them.
Great approach. I synthesized coumarines and BODIPYs. Was fun too. Especially to find stains at places under a UV lamp where you didnt expect them...
Gah, I hate BODIPY! No offence to your research, but it was my first research experience and it got truly everywhere. The prof ran a summer research “bootcamp” structured like a senior undergrad lab, so he brought in like 9 undergrads and assigned each of them one target dye that would be useful to the PhD students. Every surface in that room would turn green and red, and the base bath was pitch black 😆
Well, the purpose was to link them with conjugates for a kind of trojan horse approach for bacteria intake of modified sugars, with the plan to substitute the dyes with antibiotics.
Im super interested in this! Do you have a write up on the experiment published?
I don’t have any file I can share on it, but they [make a lanthanide complex similar to these ones](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanthanide_probes#:~:text=Lanthanides%20are%20metal%20ions%20which,lanthanides%20are%20most%20commonly%20used). It’s really easy to prepare and fluoresces quite intensely, so there’s no need to turn out the lights.
HNO3?
This is my bet. Looks like nitric acid reaction on his skin. He was wearing nitrile gloves and they don't hold up well to nitric acid. I bet his skin will peel in the next few days.
That was my first thought, but that's because I watched NileRed pour some on his fingers.
My thoughts too
Been eating doritos?
Have you been working with any indicators? p-nitrophenol causes similar stains
Nope.
Oxidation. Nitric acid or hydrogen peroxide?
Using nitrile gloves and sweating?
Yes, I used nitrile gloves and probably did sweat. Could that be the case?
I doubt it, look how bright. Also it would wash / wipe off very easily.
in my experience only the latex ones with the powder inside do this.
Aqua regia does that, it will go away after a couple days
Using acetone during glassware cleaning causes this
In the sense of, acetone + nitrile gloves = hand staining
This is the most probable thing I guess.
Nitric?
Sh*t?
Gloves are not universal. Nitrile gloves allow acetone and many other solvents to pass right them. I have seen students have chemicals like nitroaniline dissolved in acetone pass right through their gloves and stain their hands yellow. Just look up "glove chart chemical" on Google or Bing and the images should have a nice chart for appropriate gloves.
Nitric acid
Aqua regia or diluted nitric acid will do that. It will wear off in a couple days.
To have any hope, you might want to tell us what you have been working with.
I've mentioned the solvents I've used. Other than that: TiCl4, Na, Benzophenone, THF, and some hexanes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium_tetrachloride My guess is some staining from TiCl4, it's yellow when crude, and likely oxidised to a crude TiO2 (a white pigment which I could easily see becoming yellow when crude as well) Could be a myriad of things, however a better question is "how did it happen"? And "how can I stop this from happening again? Have you checked your gloves compatibility with the solvents, not all gloves are as resistive to certain things as others, some nitrile gloves will protect you for e.g. 30 minutes not multiple hours. Did you change gloves regularly? You can get microholes in gloves from as little as ~20-30 mins use.
I usually do change them every 30 mins or so, so I'm not sure. But I really think it's got something to do with the nitrile gloves. Could it be acetone spilling too much onto the gloves?
Check the compatibility of nitrile gloves with all the solvents you used. This is something we have to teach our undergraduate students (and there are some arguments as to whether we should have safe labs but where the student doesn't get to use nitrile gloves) they aren't just some magic barrier that makes you "safe" they can still have very short exposure times of solvents getting through the nitrile rubber. https://literature.impact-products.com/chemical-resistance-chart-chemres2102/65290997 It's important to be aware of what is safe when. Assuming it doesn't just wash off, then it's a stain, and I think that's most likely from the titanium chloride.
I used to sell gloves, and this is something people had a hard time understanding, not every glove is good for everything. It was a particularly important point to drive home when working with the chemo lab Sometimes Nitrile is the way, some it’s butyl. Sometimes vinyl is appropriate and still occasionally latex. Good manufacturers will print testing on their boxes. And all of those are time dependent. So something might be appropriate, but only for 10 mins, then breakdown/ breakthrough will occur.
Acetone on nitrile has a breakthrough time under 10 minutes. That means it’s safe to use, but if you spill anything you need to change them ASAP. Best practice is to change gloves immediately if you see anything contaminating them. The contaminant may not seep through on its own, but if you later spill a highly penetrating solvent on those gloves, it’ll redissolve the contamination and *carry it through to your skin*.
Holy shit, I never thought about that last part. I'm gonna start changing my gloves even more often now. I was already pretty anal about it
It can be xantate from nitric acid. But if you didn't use nitric acid ...
Are you working with nitric acid? Or is this sweat?
He did say he was wearing nitrile gloves. They aren't recommended for use with nitric acid.
HCl
Acetic acid?
Sulphur?
Did you wear at some point Alpha-Tec gloves? I once had that problem. I was synthesizing azo dyes, but my gloves were the problem.
Could be jaundice. It's definitely bromine though
Asked about the whites of his eyes for this, thinking liver, bilirubin.
clean it with orange glow
Are you a smoker??
Nitrates?
Looks like picric acid lol
Nitric acid
Furfural used to do this to me if I got some on my nitrile gloves. Probably need some different PPE for what you’re handling
I saw you mentioned working with titanium chloride, a lot of crude titanium salts are yellow, the distinct white color tends to come from being finely dispersed. You probably wore the gloves too long in contact with something that permeated through them and got titanium salts on your skin.
Nitric acid?
We get stains like that from pollen landing on particular stone benches outside our lab that are wonderful to sit on in the sun.
You do chemistry so much that you're becoming Chinese.
Looks like my fingers after picking dandelions all day
You’re turning Asian cuh.
HNO3?
If youve been working with HNO3. You should NOT wear nitril gloves!!!!!
I read that toluene permeates through nitrile in 5 minutes or less and then absorbs into your skin
Finger blasting the curry I see
3/10. If you want REALLY yellow fingers, you need to nitrate them. Mine were yellow for about a fortnight.
Have you tried different type of gloves?
Small amounts of nitric acid did this to my skin a couple of months back.
I once had yellow/orange fingers after working with para-toluidine, probably not the compound youre looking for but my point is there are many things that could cause this colouring.
My thumb was yellow for weeks after I touched nitric acid
What do the whites of your eyes look like?
?
Bilirubin.
Nitric acid
Your turning calculator!!
dandelion
I was thinking nitric acid.
Nitric acid?
Looks like phenol red
Use graded and double layered toilet paper
A coumarin?
My university doesn’t put double ply in the restrooms either. Probably just sloppy with your highlighter tho
You’re gonna die bro
Lead iodide
Looks like Xanthoprotein-reaction between the nitric acid and aromatic proteins in your skin. Nitrile gloves often get damaged seconds after contact with nitric acid. Your skin will peel in some days, but that should be all.
Ask the guy that talks weird.
Are you a smoker?
Picric Acid?
Tartrazine is also possible
Do you work with potassium iodide? It used to stain my hands & clothes yellow all the time. I also know that certain forms of nitric acid react with skin and can turn it yellow.
Looks kind of like 2,4-DNP used in organic lab.
this is what my palms look like after eating 2 oranges
Cheeto's
This happened to me sometimes with certian gloves and my hands were sweaty
Lead iodide, good luck...
Iodine?
Nitric acid will stain your fingers exactly like this
A heavy smoker by chance? /j
Definitely curry
I’m fairly certain this is a death sentence… I’m sorry to be the first to tell you!
Could be Iodine. It’s notorious for yellow stains. No idea how that would show up on your case, but that’s my most common yellow stains.
Surprised no one is saying methanol. Mine turn yellow all the time after transfer buffer
Fingers in butt?
Been fingering donald trump all day?
Cancer
WebMD moment