• What common flavor comes from a beaver’s anal glands?
Why would you want to chew on something made with “wool wax?”
Here are 10 things with secret ingredients you won’t be able to look at the same way
ever again.
10 – Plywood • Plywood is a pretty common building ingredient
all over the world.
Your house is probably made with it.
Which is fine, because plywood is just planks of wood, right?
• Well, sort of.
Plywood is held together with a certain kind of glue.
• That glue is called BLOOD GLUE.
And it’s exactly what it sounds like.
It’s a byproduct from slaughterhouses.
• Enjoy living in your house of murder.
9 – Vanilla Ice Cream • Vanilla ice cream seems like the safest
thing in the world.
The whole point of vanilla is that it’s safe from surprises.
That’s practically the definition of “Vanilla.”
• But vanilla ice cream, and several other vanilla-flavored things, have an ingredient
that makes them taste that way, and no, it isn’t vanilla bean.
• It’s castoreum.
In case you’re not familiar, that’s the anal gland secretion of a beaver.
• Surprise!
There’s a decent chance your vanilla ice cream is flavoured like beaver asshole…
at least some of the time.
8 – Perfume • Perfume is pretty simple.
People put it on and it smells nice.
Nothing more to it, right?.
• Not quite.
Let’s talk about ambergris.
Ambergris is a rare commodity used in high-end perfume that helps enhance and preserve the
scent.
• And it just so happens to come from the irritated intenstine of a sperm whale.
• They release it, it floats around in the ocean for a while, hardens, and washes up
on shore at random.
It can’t be farmed or harvested reliably, so if you’re able to find some, grab it.
It’s literally more valuable than gold.
7 – Facial Creams • There are thousands of cosmetic facial
creams out there, with all different ingredients.
The “don’t let people see what my actual face looks like” industry will try whatever
might works.
• So there’s a good chance your face cream has secrets no matter what you’re using.
• But some of them have snail in them.
The mucus-y slime and guts of snails, it turns out, are very effective skin care ingredients.
• There was a time people actually thought it was a good idea to just let snails crawl
all over your face.
But that’s weird, and gross, and impractical.
So now they just put it in jars.
6 – Beer • It’s true, not even beer is safe.
• Luckily, the secret ingredient in beer isn’t there for flavor, it’s for color.
But still… in case you wondered where that lovely golden color in your beer comes from,
it’s fish bladder.
• Isinglass is a material that comes from the air bladder of the sturgeon, and many
other fish.
It is commonly used in glue, certain types of jelly, and in beer to help give it a clear,
golden color.
• In case that grosses you out, there’s some good news.
Guinness decided to stop using isinglass in 2015.
5 – Gelatin • Gelatin is used in all sorts of gummy
candies.
That wiggly, neon-colored Jell-O stuff that old people like?
That’s gelatin.
• But actually, gelatin is the proper term for the material itself – the hardening
agent that makes Jello, gummi bears and marshmallows possible – is about 98 percent protein.
• Specifically, it’s made from animal collagen, usually coming from pork skin and
cattle bones.
• And before you start thinking your candy is a good source of protein, stop.
The extraction process basically eliminates any nutritional value.
4 – Chewing Gum • If you’ve ever looked at an ingredient
list for chewing gum, you’ve most likely seen something called “gum base.”
• And then, because you’re a normal person, you just shrugged and stopped thinking about
it.
But what is “gum base,” actually?
• There are a lot of ingredients to it, but one of the most notable is lanolin, also
known as “wool wax.”
• Lanolin is a secretion from sheep and other wooly animals.
It’s used in chewing gum, but also moisturizing body lotions and diaper rash treatments.
3 – Plastic Water Bottles • Good news, bad news time.
• The good news is, plastic water bottles don’t have any sort of secret animal secretion
ingredient.
• The bad news is, today’s plastic bottles are made with a mix of petroleum byproduct
and synthetic estrogen.
• Which would be fine, because it’s not like you eat the plastic.
But studies have shown that as the plastic breaks down – especially in high heat – it
tends to leak some of those chemicals out into your water.
2 - Sprinkles • You know those little rainbow sprinkles
you like to put on your desserts?
• Well, those are pretty much just sugar.
But you’ve probably noticed that sugar doesn’t have that shiny, glossy surface to it, right?
• That’s because that glossy covering is shellac.
And shellac is made from the secretions of the female lac bug, which is native to India
and Thailand.
• Shellac is dissolved in ethanol to become a food glaze… or a wood finish.
Just whatever the situation calls for.
Remember that when you have sprinkles on your vanilla ice cream.
1 – Hair Treatment • Calm down, guys.
Your standard shampoo on the shelf is probably fine, at least as much as anything else.
• But if you really want your hair to have that shine like they do in the TV commercials,
you have to go for the top-shelf stuff.
• And that means you have to go for the stuff with bull semen.
That’s the new craze in the world of high-end hair treatments, and yes, Cameron Diaz already
made this joke.
• This is actually real, though.
The treatment is applied after a shampoo, after which point it has to sit for a while
to “penetrate” the hair.
So… have we ruined any of these things for you?
Let us know what you think in the comments below, and we’ll pin our favorite to the
top.