alternative for lavender oil???

[ruilourosa]

Hello

Just trying to make some varnish for wet plates... no lavender oil..

any alternative oil??

Thanks

[Tin Can]

Plenty for sale on line as essential oil

[ruilourosa]

:D
yes
but now is a time that shipment companies do not understand :D

thanks!!!!

[koraks]

If you're willing to deviate from the 'original' recipes, you might also try acrylic varnish. Doesn't require heating, can be diluted with turpentine and flows fairly easily. Dries fairly quickly as well. And it can be bought in any arts supplies store.

[Wayne]

Plenty for sale on line as essential oil

Which can also probably be had at coops, health food stores, Michael's Crafts (if in the US) places like that.

I didn't know wet plates had to smell good.

[goamules]

The oil is to let the Sandarac varnish have some flexibility, to not crack. There were lots of other varnish recipes, as forensic testing has discovered. But I only use this one. If you feel brave, try any food grade oil as a substitute, and let us know how it turns out. If it where me, I'd just keep looking for the real stuff.

[Drew Wiley]

... I'll have to try to jog my memory. There is a specialty distributor in the US with a website which specializes in all kinds of traditional varnishes, shellacs, gum arabic, Sandarc, etc. I think I saw lavender oil on the site too. You might try searching under industrial gum arabic. This is not an art store, so don't waste any time there.

[goamules]

Bostick and Sullivans, and Artcraft Chemicals for wetplate supplies.

[Leigh]

Without knowing where the OP is located it's difficult to make recommendations.

Amazon has 6,000 lavender oil products.

- Leigh

[Drew Wiley]

Amazon is just about the last place to look. It will just be another ingredient in all kinds of "snake oil" products. You need to talk to someone who understands the specific application. Goamules just gave a pertinent suggestion of where to start.

[Leigh]

Amazon is just about the last place to look. It will just be another ingredient in all kinds of "snake oil" products.
Amazing how assumptions will lead us astray.

I did not look at all 6,000 offerings, but the ones I looked at on the first page appeared to be pure lavender oil.

- Leigh

[Drew Wiley]

"Pure" doesn't necessarily equate to specific functionality. I'm not personally familiar with lavender oil options. But I've sure seen a lot of "pure tung oil" claims over the years - and there's no such thing in a bottle, or it would be thicker than mayonnaise or cold molasses. How many times does that BS description happen to pop up on Amazon too? That should tell you something. Anytime the word "oil" is involved in a marketing label, there's more than a 50% chance of deceptive labeling. That even applies to the vast majority of "virgin olive oil" sold in this country. That's why I wouldn't want to gamble with any source that doesn't understand the specific application. How the heck do you know there aren't other solvents involved? These kinds of things tend to wiggle around both FDA and MSDS requirements. Just like shellacs. Some have wax in them, some don't. Some shellac products are edible, some will kill you. Some might successfully coat a film emulsion, some might dissolve it. It can make a heck of a difference.

[Leigh]

Drew,

We're not talking about tung oil. We're talking about lavender oil.

Given that Amazon has a 100% no-questions-asked return policy, how can you go wrong?

- Leigh

[Peter De Smidt]

You can also get all of the traditional varnish supplies from stringed instrument material suppliers. That way the markup will be even higher than if buying a photo product. And it "might" be made by a holy person on a sacred mountain.

[Drew Wiley]

Learn the hard way, if you wish. I've seen people go bankrupt on that premise. How can you go wrong?? - I could write a book on that one! Do you think Amazon is in the business of checking out ingredients in their listed products? Do they employ chemists from specific industries or trades? Of course not. Are they going to replace your lost image on a plate, that you might have driven six hundred miles to get in the first place? They're a big octopus with arms extending all over the place, and are already in trouble for, naively or not, selling counterfeit products.

[Leigh]

Are they going to replace your lost image on a plate, that you might have driven six hundred miles to get in the first place?
Of course not.

If you're stupid enough to drive 600 miles and use a product you haven't tested, you deserve what you get.

All products have the contents listed on the label, and MSDS sheets.
If you don't like what you see, send it back for a full refund.

- Leigh

[mdarnton]

It's not possible to name a substitute for lavendar oil without knowing your recipe to see what is doing there. It serves several different functions, in different varnish formulas. It can be a brushing lubricant, a drying retarder, a mutual solvent, or a simple solvent. It is a solvent, not an oil, and none remains after drying, so you don't need to worry about leaving it out IF you can do what you need to do without it. Another point: old recipes confuse lavendar oil and spike lavendar oil--they are not the same thing.

Anyway, the best source for this kind of thing is Kremer Pigments. They are a German company with a store in NYC so that covers the US and Europe. Everything they sell is the best quality, reliable. The most likely problem with lavendar oil is age; the fresh oil evaporates completely, but as it goes bad it increasingly polymerizes into a resin which does not evaporate. In that sense, probably the worst place to buy it is the first class product from a little back street art store with no turn-around.

If you can't find any and you want to experiment, kerosene can perform the same function in some recipes with the warning that it takes much longer to completely dry (a week instead of a day or two), and even one drop is often enough for the purpose (I mean that! A little goes a very long way*). Check your kerosene by putting a drop on white paper. If the translucency is gone after a couple of days, the kerosene is good, IF it performs the intended function (it won't work as a solvent, it won't work in recipes which are essentially alcohol based, etc.)

*I use kerosene as a brushing aid in one of my violin varnishes as a L.O. substitute. The first time I did, I made a direct per volume substitute for lavender oil and when I came back the varnish had run right off the violin and was in a puddle under it.

[Tin Can]

I believe, Micheal.

Cheers!

[goamules]

Again, buy from someone that knows your purpose. Most of the ebay and amazon ads for "lavander oil" are in the aromatherapy arena. You could buy some, test it in an expensive batch of sandarac varnish, finish some plates, and wait a few months or years to see if your image fades, cracks, or fogs.

Or just get it for $8.00 here:

https://www.bostick-sullivan.com/cart/1063.html

I've bought from B&S and tested their wetplate kits, written reviews about them. Always happy. They are great resources for this type of photography. Let's keep the photography suppliers in business, and let the aromatherapy small businesses fend for themselves.

[Tin Can]

+111!

[Drew Wiley]

Leigh - very few products like that have MSDS sheets because they're not targeted to a regulated market. Garrett hit the nail on the head. And even industrial products which do have MSDS sheets aren't required to list every ingredient, but only hazardous ones; and even some of those can be left out if they're classified as a trade secret. Gosh, until we had all this stuff on software, we kept two entire trailers of MSDS sheets just outside the warehouse due to all the military business we did. We were also surrounded by big pharmaceutical and biotech labs who also required everything up front, documented. I know the ropes. And the number on rule is, that if you don't know the effect of something, thoroughly test it first! And even if it works, make sure the next time around, the product hasn't changed due to aging or storage issues, which has also been pointed out above. Back when I was doing faux
finishing on remodels of historic homes - having to match wood grain on access holes or panels for rewiring, plumbing acess etc, I learned how various oils and shellacs age-polymerized, and induced that kind of thing to create
special matching effects.

[Mike in NY]

I think the OP was hoping for an immediately available substitute, as he didn't have the time to wait to place an order. I've always used oil of lavender, and have not come across any contemporary substitutes for the oil ingredient. However, a graduate student by the name of Jens Gold wrote his master's thesis last year, titled "The Ambrotype / Wet Collodion Positives on Glass: Treatment Challenges on Complex Nineteenth-Century Photographic Objects." He mentions that many 19th Century recipes involved combinations of not only sandarac and oil of lavender, but also shellac, mastic, dammar, castor oil, thyme oil, Canada balsam and camphor. So one might consider the substitutability of readily available castor oil, but a potential difficulty would be knowing the proportion to use, as its properties might differ from oil of lavender. But it might do in a pinch. Either that, or let the plates dry where no dust will settle on them, order the lavender, and varnish them at a later time.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, every single substitute thing you mention is also a CATEGORY of product, containing many specific options. So access to specialty dealers is equally important. Take shellac. A woodworking supplier might carry twenty different options, a scientific supplier, totally different options; a paint manufacturer has still different requirements, and in volume; a hot-melt adhesive maker, something else again; and then there's food-grade shellac. You've no doubt eaten it. In fact, See's Candy is the biggest importer of shellac in the world. Yep, you've been eating aphid Goretex all along! And the term "varnish" goes all over the map. What coats one thing well might dissolve and strip another. What seemingly goes on fine might craze atop gelatin once it cures. There are chemists who dedicate entire careers to varnishes. It's a term that embraces thousands of products, often very differently derived, and for very different purposes. And the term meant different products in the 19th C than it does today.

[mdarnton]

Mike in NY--Castor oil is a real oil (which lavender isn't--it's a solvent like turpentine) and couldn't be substituted. A few drops will turn varnish into a sloppy mess that will never dry. Its purpose in such a recipe is to add flexibility. Thyme oil is probably the lavender equivalent in that recipe, as a solvent, but I have never seen that for sale as a solvent.

[Mike in NY]

Mdarnton, I thought about that as I was falling asleep in bed last night, and realized the same thing. I thought perhaps Thyme oil might have similar properties to lavender, but I really don't know.

Drew, I don't disagree with anything you say, I just don't think it does anything to answer the OP's question. He was in a bind and needed a substitute then and there. Your observations are all accurate, but don't answer his question, so why post them?

[Drew Wiley]

Why post them? If there are nails lying all over road, would you want someone unaware of them? It's fairly common to see references to antique processes resurrected on the web or even in book form, sometimes as direct copies. I have a shelf full of this kind of interesting literature, mostly concerning photographic media I don't even personally work with. Unless someone has done their homework or consulted an expert - either a restorationist (professional conservator) or someone currently skilled in that specific process, there is likely to be misunderstanding about various things, like overcoating in this instance. Or, as we've already seen on this immediate thread, people rush to the web and discover a multitude of product listing, without understanding they're really entering a spider's web if they aren't cautious. Sure, I could mention any number of hypothetical options. But since I don't work in this particular media, I haven't tested any of them. I do own a lot of true antique photographs from all kinds of processes, and would of course have the liberty to attempt to recoat some of those. If I did happen to do that, I'd have to distinguish between photos of significant historic value, which I wouldn't want to disturb at all, and those suitable for casual wall decor which I'd be willing to compromise for purposes of display. In the latter case, I could just grab something on hand like Renaissance wax, or a microfiber cloth and some gum arabic, or go modern with true butylacetate print lacquer, which would look great but then start to conspicuously yellow in 15 years or so. And it all also depends on whether someone wants to replicate an antique method religiously, or invent some new tweak. Gosh. I know people like simple answers, and get impatient with me when I try to explain what is actually a bit of a maze. I come from a career background where I had to routinely act as a consultant to similar questions, not only concerning artwork, but very often, extremely expensive architectural restorations. Any number of these were re-dos because someone naively swallowed generic advice prior, and ended up with a nightmare. Just to be in the league of correct answers, I had to personally test hundreds of various coating and binder options. I had clients dealing with everything from Frank Lloyd Wright remodels to the most expensive yachts on earth to genuine Stradivarius violins (which I wouldn't even touch, but did know a valid expert to refer them to). And I can't automatically assume that a question on this forum doesn't pertain to something a printmaker would truly like to keep over the long haul. If it's a temporary or disposable kind of print, they should say so. The mere fact that this is a large format forum suggests they are reasonably dedicated to their craft. So now do you see where I'm coming from?

[Mike in NY]

186551

[Drew Wiley]

If it's so important to you, Mike, run your own tests, then report back in thirty years or fifty or a hundred years, when you might have a legitimate answer, and not a sheer guess.