I heard a high pitched noise coming from the area the container was in, then a bubbly noise. Smelled like hand sanitizer and I saw that at the bottom of the container is this thick clear goo. I breathed in the fumes of whatever this stuff is. Any idea WTF it is? I threw away the container

  • Fondots@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 hour ago

    My guess, and I’m just kind of spitballing here, is that it fermented

    Lollipops are basically just sugar and sugar is hygroscopic - it readily pulls moisture from the air. Eventually if it’s humid enough it could pull enough moisture from the air and start dissolving, so the goo is basically sugar-water

    There’s a lot of natural yeast and bacteria and such all around you in the air and on just about every surface you could imagine, some was in the jar and found the sugar and started doing it’s thing fermenting the sugars

    Fermentation takes sugars and turns them into alcohol and carbon dioxide (bit of a simplification)

    Carbon dioxide is a gas, so there’s the bubbling, and the whistling noise was probably gas escaping from the jar as the pressure built up too high for the seal on the container to handle. The bubbling may have also picked up a bit when the gas started escaping too because under pressure some of it probably dissolved into the sugar goo, like it does into a can of soda, then when you crack the can open the pressure drops and the gas comes out of solution and bubbles.

    And of course hand sanitizer is alcohol, so there’s the smell.

  • FelixCress@lemmy.world
    476·
    8 hours ago

    What country are you in? If it was EU I would think it would be sugar, perhaps fermented. If USA probably some kind of toxic addictive chemicals they use in “food” items.

    • Durian@lemmy.cafeOPEnglish
      13·
      8 hours ago

      UK and the lollipops were Swizzels Fruity Pops. Can’t remember how many of them there were but I’d say about 50 in a large container.