PlanetMace Blog

Understanding the Strength of Your Pepper Spray

Pepper spray is one of the most effective self protection devices on the market today, and provides a safe, non-lethal means of warding off an attacker from a safe distance without inflicting mortal damage to the assailant. Given the rise in popularity of pepper spray devices for both professional law enforcement use and personal safety, a wide variety of self defense devices have come onto the market with a range of compositions of active ingredients and other functional solvents that are combined in what can be a confusing concoction of chemicals that can leave the average consumer confused and potentially misled.

When it comes to something that you’re entrusting your life to, such as a device that you’re depending on to protect you from a violent threat; potentially a fatal one, recognizing how companies measure and label the effectiveness of their product is an important element of personal safety. For example, purchasing a canister of pepper spray that is too diluted, or too weak to effectively work, could potentially just annoy and aggravate an attacker into more dramatic violence rather than subdue and immobilize them. Furthermore, relying on such gimmick-endorsed products is simply a waste of money and a false assurance of protection.

In order to properly assess these pepper based spray products simple representative numbers can be misleading and entirely uninformative, so understanding the methodology and reasoning behind the various tests that are used to define and classify pepper spray products is equally as important as choosing to carry such personal safety devices in the first place.

What is Pepper Spray?
In order to understand how the various approaches to measuring pepper spray differentiate the assortment of products on the market, one should first understand what pepper spray products are comprised of. Pepper spray itself is derived from the plant belonging to the species Oleoresin Capsicum, which is where the abbreviation “OC” comes from. OC products rely on the active ingredient Capsaicin, a concentrated extract of the peppers themselves, to disable attackers through the severe inflammatory reaction it causes in the mucus membrane of our lungs, eyes, and throats.

Quite simply, when someone is sprayed with OC, their eyes swell shut, their pupils dilate, and their lungs and throat swell as well, to make vision and breathing nearly impossible for a short period of time.

But just having Capsaicin in a bottle is not enough to provide an effective personal safety solution, and other chemical agents are necessary as a binding agent or carrier agent for the OC, a propellant for providing the trajectory that makes it possible to defend oneself at a distance, and possibly marking dyes that make it possible for police to positively identify a suspect up to 48 hours after an attack has occurred. As these other agents can make up as much as 95% or more of the total solution contained in a pepper spray canister product, representations of a product’s ability to ward of attackers that are presented as total concentration of OC need to be further scrutinized in order to make a meaningful assessment of the product’s effectiveness.

Concentration of Pepper Spray in the Product vs. OC in the Pepper Spray
If the concentration of pepper spray within the total chemical matrix of pepper spray product ranges between 5-10%, then it would intuitively be assumed that the higher the percentage of pepper spray, the stronger and more effective the product.

This is inaccurate.

As pepper is a natural product that varies in its genetic makeup from species to species and even from individual plant to plant, there are many variations in terms of how much oily resin is contained within the pepper spray element of the matrix. Some product that advertise a pepper spray concentration of 10% may be using OC that does not contain a very potent concentration of capsaicin, while a 5% solution may simply have more propellant added for greater range, and may have a much higher concentration of capsaicin in the pepper component of the spray, and would therefore provide a more effective defense against an attacker.

In order to evaluate the true effectiveness of a pepper spray product, we therefore must rely on more definitive testing procedures to define the strength of comparable self protection devices.

SHU vs. HPLC
The two most widely recognized methods for testing and measuring a pepper spray product’s effectiveness are SHU (Scoville Heat Units) and HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography), and each differs greatly in its scientific testing method and accuracy of results.

SHU is for the most part, a subjective test of a pepper’s hotness: based on the assessment of 5 ‘OC Specialists’; individuals who physically taste and rate the heat of the pepper. As such this method is not very scientific, and it would be difficult to consistently replicate the same results for the same set of variables across a wide platform of testers. While this method may be acceptable for judging the spiciness of foods for a culinary academy, it is a bit primitive in terms of assessing the performance of life critical devices such as pepper spray canisters.

HPLC, on the other hand, is a chemical lab analysis test that measures the complete spectrum of all chemicals and concentrations contained within a products pepper solution, and the testing method is prescribed by the US Government’s “Official Analytical Methods of the American Spice Trade Association (HPLC method 21.1)”. This means that every canister of a single product should test uniformly across the board in any laboratory in any part of the country, making it a more reliable measurement of a product’s effective concentrations of active ingredients.

Conclusion
In summary, with a wide assortment of pepper spray products available on the market, it is important for consumers to recognized that products rated and measured with a high quantity of active ingredients as measured by the HPLC method are more reliable and presumably a better choice than products simply rated by the SHU standard.