There’s a bunch of clay right at the shoreline of the beach, my daughter wants to try it as a face mask so we brought home about 5lbs of it last night. However we’re both concerned about disinfecting/purifying it before she leaves it on her skin for any length of time. We also have flesh-eating algae in the water around here, so we’d rather be safe than sorry.
Unfortunately all I can find online pertains to purifying/cleaning clay for pottery. Any ideas on how we can clean/disinfect this stuff?
Pete Gossett said:We also have flesh-eating algae in the water around here, so we’d rather be safe than sorry.
Seems like not getting it anywhere near your face would be a really wise choice under the circumstances.
Otherwise microwave? Oven?
I'd try using it to clean your car's paint first. Though I'm not sure if it'd recommend using it on skin if it worked well or paint, or if it worked poorly.
Yeah, a solid boil seems like it would kill most anything. They say 7 minutes of rolling boil means safe to drink.
Maybe get a pot from Goodwill...
In reply to Robbie :
I have a “garage pot” we could try it with. I was thinking the boiling heat might solidify or at least dry out the clay. Though I suppose submerged in water that would be unlikely.
If you're going to do it with boiling water you really need to break it up and create a slurry, then get that to boiling temp. If it stays in chunks you may not get the center of the chunks hot enough to kill bacteria. Once it's well boiled you could conceivably bake it down or otherwise let it dry until it's thick enough to use as a mask.
Honestly, as someone that makes disinfectants for a living and deals with bacteria some...I'd recommend against doing it. The risk isn't worth the benefit if you know you have any of the flesh eating bacteria (or myriad other things) in your area.
If it's the same formation we have on the Gulf Coast here, it's not really clay. We'll, it is, but it isn't. It's actually a decomposing shale which was a clay but then got turned into a rock by being buried and heated up just a bit and th there was some uplift and erosion and it's exposed again. It's not super old, you can find early horse teeth in it from before the last couple of ice ices. It's somewhere between 200k and 10k years old depending on where it is and when it was laid down.
Edit: did some reading, over here it's the Beumont Formation and it never did completely lithify.
Anyway, most of the Gulf Coast clays are similar in age from the last glacial periods. Pretty nasty stuff. Main concern would be modern parasites. I think most of the properly nasty ones are in fresh water, but don't make me promise to that. We head down the coast after hurricanes to fossil hunt in it. We've got a big pile of worm burrows and bits of horse bone and teeth. We've been hoping to snag a mammoth tooth but hasn't happened yet. Kids mucking about in the muck and getting rather icky and no I'll effects that we can discern. Not sure I want to spread it on my face though......
"Dad, I wanna smear clay on my face."
" What the berkeley for? Go talk to your mother."
The only Clay I'm aware of would mess up your face, all the while taunting you with, "SAY MY NAME! SAY MY NAME!"
Flesh eating algae? That's a new one on me. "Flesh eating bacteria" is massively overblown. Yeah, uh, IF about a dozen other things happen. Otherwise the "flesh eating bacteria" is all around you RIGHT THIS MOMENT!!11!!! WE'LL ALL BE KILLZED!!11!!1!!
In reply to Dr. Hess :
I’m not sure, I just remember warnings about the red algae blooms last year & news articles from a couple years ago of people dying or losing limbs after being in the water with open wounds.
In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :
I truthfully have no idea. I can tell you it’s medium grey in color while submerged/wet, but the chunks that wash up on the beach dry out & look like chunks of charcoal, but softer.
We’ve never found any shark’s teeth, etc. here, but with the barrier islands we barely get any shells or other debris on the beach.
You won't find sharks teeth in it. It's was a land deposit which is why you find horse and mammoth stuff. I like geology.
ultraclyde said:If you're going to do it with boiling water you really need to break it up and create a slurry, then get that to boiling temp. If it stays in chunks you may not get the center of the chunks hot enough to kill bacteria. Once it's well boiled you could conceivably bake it down or otherwise let it dry until it's thick enough to use as a mask.
Honestly, as someone that makes disinfectants for a living and deals with bacteria some...I'd recommend against doing it. The risk isn't worth the benefit if you know you have any of the flesh eating bacteria (or myriad other things) in your area.
+1
Not worth the risk.
Walmart, less than $10.00
mazdeuce - Seth said:You won't find sharks teeth in it. It's was a land deposit which is why you find horse and mammoth stuff. I like geology.
In this particular case, a person may think it's scatology.
Black girls in Mississippi are known to eat a certain clay. I believe it’s called pika. Not the clay, but eating the clay.
You are correct, pica is eating something other than food. The clay you reference has medicinal properties:
Local to us in central georgia there is a white clay called kaolin that is the remains of seashells from millions of years ago. Other fossils are routinely found in it, even a whole whale skeleton nearby. It used in millions of manufactured items and is quite valuable and is extensively strip mined. It's the main ingredient in Kaopectate. It used to be common practice in the rural areas its mined to eat it straight in small amounts.
That's a whole different thing than wet clay of the beach.
And just in case you think it doesn't happen stateside .. Texas man with new tattoo dies after swimming in Gulf. Now, granted, a tattoo is a LOT of compromised skin area, and yes, it's unlikely that one or two small skin breaks on your daughter's would have the same results even if exposed to that (fairly common) bacteria but...
is she willing to take that chance?
Color me skeptical, but this sounds like the equivalent of coming across a stream and wanting to drink it as if it were a bottle of 'fresh mountain spring water' from the store. I just don't think it typically works like that...But then again, my knowledge of the science behind beauty treatments is pretty much non-existent.
This has turned into a remarkably interesting thread. I'd never heard the term "lithify" before.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Yea this definitely got a lot more involved than I expected. I don't know much about clay other than we make bricks out of it
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