Testors Enamel Paint warning

[VinceM]

Originally Posted by whulsey

If you're in the US, unless its a 30+ year old bottle no lead. Except for some pigments (such as cadmiums) the main toxic materials are the thinners and solvents. Even then if you use care (see Air Dave's comments above) shouldn't be any problem. Being enamels once they're cured shouldn't be a problem even microwaving the cup.

Metallic paints should probably not be microwaved. Our wedding china has a gold paint around the rim, and once I tried to microwave a plate. Sparks danced around the plate, and the gold finish darkened. Don't know about Testors metallic paints, but i wouldn't. Just sayin'.

[darter]

Dave is right, nothing is safe once atomised or reduced to particles in the air.
I've been spraying and airbrushing every type of paint for 50 years.
A simple booth can be made from a cardboard box and a computer fan..Youtube it.
A simple particle/dust mask is better than nothing.
A filter mask is best though.
Once we thought it was safe to blow out brake dust.
But if you smoke, then don't worry about it, a bit of fumes ain't gunna make any difference.

[southwestforests]

Here's something from the nail salon industry which may shed some sense of proportion on the thing,

For example, there have been studies done on laboratory animals that have linked some salon chemicals with birth defects or other abnormalities, but the levels that lab animals were exposed to were hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of times higher than what a nail technician is exposed to working in the salon. So again, the research doesn’t necessarily prove humans will react the same way animals do to those chemicals. In another study, methacrylates (a type of plastic used in acrylic nail products) were shown to cause fetal deformities in chickens and rats, but studios of women working in the plastics industry, where the exposure to methacrylates is much higher than in the salon, did not show an increase in miscarriages or birth defects. Other studies have linked human illness to the kinds of chemicals used in nail products, but the exposure levels also are much higher than what nail technicians encounter under average salon conditions. For example, toluene (a solvent used in nail polish) is known to cause mental retardation and physical deformities similar to those found in victims of fetal alcohol syndrome. However, says Dr. Thomas Shepard, you’d have to sniff from eight to 32 ounces of toluene; a day to cause these effects. This is the equivalent of inhaling all the toluene from 20½ ounce bottles of nail polish per day,
“The dosage is one of the main problems we face. We know that about half the chemicals we test [cause fetal malformation] in animals, but we test them at about 1,000 times what a human is expensed to,” says Shepard, a professor of pediatrics and an adjunct professor of both obstetrics and environmental health at the University of Washington-Seattle Pediatric Hospital.

Will Doing Nails Hurt My Baby? - Health - NAILS Magazine

[whulsey]

Wasn't thinking about the metallic paints, good idea not to stick them in a microwave.