Spirit Gum!!

You: So hey, Az, what's up with this Spirit Gum crap? You talk about it an awful lot.

Me: It's awesome!! :D

You: I get that....but what is it?

Me: -.- you don't know?

You: >shakes head< nope.

Me: Damn...I'll fix that....

You: Please do....

Okay, okay, I don't get fan mail like that (though I wish I did). But 1: I haven't done a costume-related hub for a while, and 2: I just realized that most people don't know what spirit gum is exactly.

Now unfortunately for all of us, the theatre business isn't very open about their trade secrets and the how-to's of their inner world and magic that make Joe-Schmoe the big bad wolf. Meaning, they don't care if we know how to use it, or if we buy it, but if we want to know what's in it. Nuh uh, they ain't saying a word. Fortunately, I know a little chemistry (I'd better, I'm majoring in it), and I, being of the young generation, know how to navigate the world wide interwebs.

Spirit Gum is made primarily of two things, both of them fairly natural. Alcohol, and resin. Yep, that's right. These two serve a valuable purpose for each other, making it easy to use, and pretty darn safe for skin use.

The alcohol is the solvent. For those who don't know a lot of chemistry terms, the solvent is the thing doing the dissolving. Meaning there was a certain amount of the resin dissolved in the alcohol to make it usable. The acohol's official name is SD Alcohol 35-A. Now, wait a minute, before all of those little red flags start screaming at me "NOT SAFE, NOT SAFE!!!!" Let's check out what SD Alcohol 35-A is actually made of. 95.38% of the alcohol is made with ethanol, and the other 4.62% is ethyl acetate. Plus, it is a denatured alcohol.

I'll tackle denatured first. It's super easy. You can't get drunk off of it. Right, they took the nature out of alcohol. How sad. :( (No underage drinking) The way they do this is they take normal ethanol (hey, that's 95.38% of our SD Alcohol 35-A crap!!) and they add other solutions to it to make it poisonous when ingested. (Put down those red flags!!) Usually the denaturing spirit is methanol, which has almost the same boiling point as ethanol, but is dangerous to drink. Usually, they put about 10% of methanol in rubbing alcohol. That's right. Rubbing alcohol. Now it isn't so bad when I put a common name to it right? You put rubbing alcohol on cuts when they're small enough. You use it to get an extra clean face. So remember, safe enough to use on skin, not safe enough to get drunk.

So last, we get to tackle ethanol, and ethyl acetate. Ethanol is just your normal alcohol. It is highly concetrated, so it was be fairly dangerous to ingest anyways, but it's just a normal alcohol that could be found in nature. Which is always good. Ethyl acetate is a little harder to explain. It's still sort of ethanol. You can tell that from "ethyl". Acetate (for chem people) is just as easy. It comes from acetic acid. Acetic acid is commonly found in vinegar, even wines. All they do to get "ethyl acetate" is they mix ethanol and acetic acid in a jar, poof, bang, fizzle, pop!, magic happens, and ethyl acetate is made. (It's not really that exciting, but oh well. Got to make it interesting somehow).

For all the Chemistry guys out there, I'll even put the balanced chemical equation for you. :) 'Cause I'm a nerd like that.

Equation:

CH₃CH₂OH + CH₃COOH ⇌ CH₃COOCH₂CH₃ + H₂O

Most labs usually use a catalyst that increases their yield by taking out the water and disrupting the equilibrium of the reaction. Pretty cool, huh?

So that takes care of the solvent part, the next part is really super easy, I promise. No chemical equations (unless I randomly change my mind whilst writing this hub), and no long complicated explanations. Resin is all natural, and it is basically the sticky crap that comes from pine trees (for bio geeks out there, the resin is mainly any viscous liquid that comes from a variety of coniferous trees). You know this stuff; it's when you go camping and in the first pine tree you touch gives you a sticky feeling. It makes you smell like a tree for the rest of your trip and it's a bitch to clean off, even with soap and water. Yeah, they dissolve that crap in a weird alcohol to give us an all natural adhesive.

Think of how effective that is. It's sticky crap from your camping trip, mixed with rubbing alcohol. The alcohol makes the sticky crap easy to use, and it tells you exactly how to take it off. You guessed it, since the alcohol dissolves the resin, just use alcohol to take it off! Amazing!

Yep, that easy...sort of. It's not like you can make your own. The problem with that is actually being able to find the right mix of alcohol and resin, and for that you would need more chemistry stuff. Which, you never know, I may put in another hub. But for now, I'll let this stew. I hope you enjoyed knowing the in's and out's of everyone's favorite theatre grade adhesive. Until next time!