Hand sanitizer cleans marker smudges off kids' hands

Greg discovered that hand sanitizer cleans up more than germs:

My 2-year old son was coloring with markers and, as you can imagine, managed to get just as much marker on his hands as he did the paper. After he finished coloring, dinner was ready, so I decided to wait until after we ate to get his hands cleaned up. I thought I would just put some hand sanitizer on his hands and he would be fine to eat. I was pleasantly surprised when I finished rubbing the sanitizer on his hands to see that they were perfectly clean. The marker was gone. I then remembered how alcohol is good at removing pen marks from furniture, among other places one would not want ink (I once had to get ink off of my computer monitor with alcohol). Instead of using rubbing alcohol on a child's hands, hand sanitizer does the trick.

Comments

[Jim]

And with the holidays coming up, it also works wonders on sticky pine sap!

[John]

Umm, check the Active Ingredient in hand sanitizer - 62% Ethyl Alcohol. The rest is just goo.

Alcohol on a cloth or cotton would have the same effect.

[Parent Hacks Editor]

John: True, but it's not as portable.

[MS]

FYI, isopropyl alcohol (aka rubbing alcohol) is more effective at removing Sharpie ink than ethanol, if you have a particularly tough stain. We use Sharpies to write on glass in the lab all the time, and sometimes ethanol just isn't enough.

[chris]

It's not just the alcohol. There's something magical about sanitizer. it is also great for removing sticky residue from price tags. I thought it was just the alcohol but tried the alcohol first on a few things and it didn't work, then the sanitizer got it right off.

[Becky C.]

Also works great on the sticky residue left over from band-aids, or to help loosen them up a bit to lessen the "ouch".