What is Common Chemistry?

Short YouTube videos about the chemicals you may come across in your daily life

There’s a huge amount of misinformation and mistrust about the things that we encounter in our daily lives, we all know the fear mongering over vaccines and food additives, medicines and alternative healing, even artificial vs natural chemicals. The language and the truth of chemistry is really difficult to read and understand for most people so Common Chemistry is hoping to demystify chemicals one by one, finding out what the dangers are and putting them into perspective. All the information is available on the internet if only someone could put it together into bite-size chunks. With the hope that if you ever want to know about something in an ingredients list you’ll be able to find something here to help you on making a decision on whether to bring that into your home.

Common Chemistry aims to avoid the easy pickings of only covering the interesting or contravention chemicals, the things that go bang or cause extreme harm are often talked about to exhaustion. But finding out exactly how dangerous the rest of chemicals on food labels and in cosmetics are can be extremely hard. Often they have many alternative uses that are higher on the search results pages than their use as foods or there are sensationalist articles taking studies way past what the findings of the scientists discovered and published.

There’s a fundamental mistrust of things that are made difficult to understand too. Chemical names are often long and complex, some chemicals have multiple different names depending on who discovered them and what the most important role of the chemical was that they were studying. Companies make this harder again by branding chemicals and trying to avoid controversy or maintain a production licence. One example chemical that almost everyone has used is acetyl-para-aminophenol this is generally how chemists would name the painkilling drug that you may have taken under the names Acetaminophen, Atasol, Calpol, Febridol, Paracetamol, Panadol, Panamax, Tylenol, and more, it makes it very difficult to stay reliably informed about this chemical, and this problem is multiplied by the more than 400 approved food additives in Europe and North America.