6 Uses for Glycerine, a Jack-of-all-trades Wonder Compound

Sometimes a chemist comes up with a really cool compound that can fix one or two really important problems, and other times somebody discovers a material that has literally a gajillion uses. Glycerine, also known as glycerol, has about a gajillion uses — and that's not really an exaggeration.

Glycerine was first discovered in 1779 by a Swedish chemist named Carl Wilhelm Scheele — the same guy who first described the attributes of oxygen and a bunch of other elements like hydrogen, barium and chlorine. The late author and biochemist Isaac Asimov referred to him as "hard-luck Scheele," due to the fact that he was scooped by other scientists in publishing some of his most important findings, thereby losing full credit for these discoveries.

Scheele discovered glycerine accidentally while boiling together olive oil and lead monoxide, and he called the resulting material "the sweet principle of fat," because of its slightly sweet taste. Later, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul named it glycerine (from glykys, the Greek word for sweet).

Glycerine is a non-toxic, transparent, viscous, water-soluble liquid with a high boiling point that can be found in both vegetable and animal fats. Chemically, it acts like an alcohol, in that it can be reacted in some situations, but it's generally stable. Here are a few of the gajillion uses for this miraculous stuff:

1. Soap

Glycerine is an ingredient in many soaps, but strangely enough, soapmaking is also a way to produce glycerine. Chemists sometimes even formulate industrially-manufactured soap as a means to produce glycerine, which is the commercial name for glycerol.

Glycerine is produced through the saponification process, which creates soap by converting oil or fat into soap and glycerine by heating the lipids and adding an alkali like sodium hydroxide, or lye. "Melt and pour" soaps that are molded into fun shapes generally have a high glycerine content.

2. Hair and Skin Care Products

Because glycerol is a humectant, meaning it can attract and bind moisture to it, it's a common ingredient in beauty products meant to moisturize, like lotions, conditioners and shampoos. Glycerine in haircare products can keep hair from overdrying and splitting and is used in shampoos that treat dandruff and itchy scalp.

Lotions and skin care products use glycerine for the same reasons hair care products use them: They attract and chemically hold onto moisture. Lotions, for instance, generally contain three main ingredients: a humectant; an emollient, which smooths cellular rough spots; and an occlusive, which provides a protective barrier over the skin so moisture doesn't escape. Glycerine is the most commonly used humectant in skin care because it pulls moisture to the surface of the skin from the air and from deeper layers of the skin, leaving your complexion looking dewy.

3. Food

Glycerine is useful as a food additive, as it serves scads of different functions. It's a sugar alcohol, so it can act as a sweetener, although it's around 60 to 75 percent as sweet as sugar. It's generally preferred over other sugar alcohols like sorbitol and mannitol because it's less likely to have a laxative effect when eaten.

Because of glycerine's moisture binding properties, it helps preserve breads, cakes and energy bars, preventing them from drying out. Its viscous texture can add thickness and smoothness to liquids. Because it's such a jack-of-all-trades, glycerine can be found in drinks, condiments, cake icings, soft candies, canned soup, marshmallows and chewing gum.

4. Pharmaceuticals

Because glycerine is naturally sweet, it's used to make medicines like cough syrups and lozenges more palatable. But its sweetness isn't the only benefit of glycerine in medicines — it's a great thickener for topical ointments. Glycerine suppositories attract water out of the colon to move things along in the digestive system. Otherwise, glycerine is used as an excipient — just a neutral vehicle for the active ingredients in things like eye drops, ear drops and gel capsules. Glycerine is also used as a medium for freezing things like sperm, red blood cells and other living tissues.

5. Paints, Inks and Plastics

Glycerine has lots of industrial applications. For instance, it used to be the main ingredient in antifreeze, but it's largely been replaced by other chemicals that don't taste as sweet, and therefore don't attract and kill animals when it's spilled on the ground.

Glycerine is an important building block of paints and resins used for coating things like wires. It's also used as a softener in plastics, and is used extensively in food wrappers because it's nontoxic and can prevent shrinkage.

6. Vaping Liquid

Vegetable glycerine is a common base in many vaping fluids for e-cigarettes, which some vapers prefer because high glycerine content makes for a very visible aerosol.