Thread: Sterilizing "New to Me" razors

One way to minimize bleach's corrosive effect is to clean off the active rust with a rag and a polishing compound (i always throw away the rag after that), give it a good rinse and then give it a 15min bleach bath. Just dillute your average 5% bleach solution with about 4 parts water.

MSDS's for Barbecide, Barbecide Plus and Clippercide

Barbicide_MSDS.pdf

Barbicide_Plus_MSDS.pdf

Clippercide_Spray_MSDS.pdf

Okay, I did a little checking:

Bakelite is probably up to being boiled or autoclaved. It is said to be very temperature resistant once set.

Not sure about celluloid, but since table tennis (aka ping pong) balls are made from celluloid one could run an experment using one.

Natural materials such as bone, ivory, wood - don't know. I would be very nervous about exposing wood to high temperature steam or hot water howerver.

If you want to see what barbicide or clippercide might do to celluloid, spray, dunk a ping pong ball and let us know.

fccexpert you are correct sir, I miss typed (Shhhh) I'm at work. Yes I did mean to say 20psi. But that dosen't count the time to get to heat, and cool down to alow the autoclave to be opened. Full cycle on a flash autoclave is 30 min approx.
Phil

I use hydrogen peroxide to sanitize mine.

I use an alcohol based hand steriliser, the type they use in hospitals. I think it is mostly alcohol, so i just use it on the blade, nowhere near the scales.
I was wondering if it is possible to autoclave the wapienica razors, which are all steel. I have an 18 litre pressure cooker left over from various mycology serilisations i was doing last year, so i guess you could probably use it for an all steel razor. Just not sure if it would create tarnish on the blade at all as when i sterilised a scalpel blade it went black probably due to some aluminium foil i had in there on top of a jar.
Nick

Can I ask why anyone would want to autoclave a razor? Autoclaves are for use on heat resistant material only. What do you think you're dealing with here? Ebola? Use Milton fluid - it's essentially a 2% bleach solution used for baby's bottles and will kill anything likely to be anywhere near a blade stone dead. If it doesn't kill what's on the blade then you my friend are living somewhere mighty dangerous! Seriously - what is this obsession with sterility? Just be careful and don't cut yourself in the first place!

Blueprinciple - In case you missed it, bleach solution, even a 0.5% solution will attack metal blades and pins. Autoclaves are not really that hot, only about 250-270 deg F. Some, but not all, scale materials can probably handle that. An autoclave is actually the only way to sterilize a razor, the other methods discussed only disinfect. The biggest concerns are hepatitis B and C. I'm personally not worried about B since I have been vacinated.

Scientists agree that a fragile virus such as HIV does not survive well in the environment but the jury is still out on exactly how long it can survive outside of a host.

studies have shown that drying of HIV-infected human blood or other body fluids reduces the theoretical risk of environmental transmission by 90 to 99 percent within several hours.

This is according to Avert an international aids charity.http://www.avert.org/faq1.htm#q22

Hours? What happened to seconds and minutes?

variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or mad cow has proven to be resistant to sterilization and might be spread via the reuse of surgical instruments http://www.sciencedaily.com


Read more, ask more, and learn more. Do as much as you can to separate the wheat from the chaff. Then make an educated choice, decision and hopefully not a mistake.