According to this article on No More Dirty Looks, certain brands of skin lotion can be read as explosives by Airport detectors. Sounds like an urban legend, doesn’t it? Let’s take a look….
Do cosmetics contain “explosive” ingredients?
Cosmetics themselves are not explosive. As a recent post on Colin’s Beauty Pages points out, if they were we’d have warehouses of cosmetics blowing up all the time. But, ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer used to make illicit explosives, is used in a few cosmetics as a buffering agent.
Is there enough nitrate to be detectable?
Buffering agents and salts to control pH are typically used at a few tenths of a percent. If you rubbed lotion on your arm that contained 0.1% of a nitrate, the amount nitrate deposited would be above the detection threshold of devices like the EN5000 Tabletop Detector, made by Scintrex Trace Corp, which can detect nitrates down to the nanogram and picogram level.
The Beauty Brains bottom line
We agree with Colin that it’s ridiculous that your skin lotion could be explosive. But it seems plausible that some lotions could trigger a false positive on airport detectors.
Has anyone ever had this problem while going through airport security? Leave a comment and share your experience.
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I hadn’t realised devices like that nitrate detector existed. That’s interesting. Presumably they could be calibrated to detected other ionic species and so could be used to show how little of what we apply to the skin actually penetrates.
So funny you wrote this article, because I was wondering the same thing. I went on a flight a few months ago, and they randomly swabbed my hands, stomach and feet. The detector went off because it detected an explosive chemical on me. (This was at 3:00am – I literally woke up, showered, moisturized, and went to the airport).
Well I was interrogated, needed to to a body search and go in the body scanner, they took down all of my information, searched everything. It was pretty embarassing and I was a little scared to tell you the truth! I was wondering how the heck a chemical like that would get on me???
I thought that maybe it was a malfunction with their machine, but maybe it was my explosive moisturizer lol?
It happened to my aunt. Apparently it’s the glycerin in some lotions.
I remember for sure that I used organic virgin coconut oil on my skin before going to the airport. I wonder if that would set off detectors?
This is exactly what I experienced today in SFO airport. I think they should find another method to detect explosives.
Hi everyone, same thing happened to my husband. He doesn’t use any body lotion, and his face lotion has no glycerin in it. They found traces of nitrates on his body and had to empty and scan all his luggage – and his business associate. TSA suggested is could have been traces in the rental car Kevin drove; the person may have been golfing at a nearby major course (fertilizer). Kevin and I wondered if it’s the new, “natural” clothes detergent we’ve been using, which apparently has plant-derived detergents. Plant have natural nitrates, so I wonder it that’s plausible?
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