Thank you so much for clicking on this video. I appreciate your interest and your time very much. Right. So, let's talk about the alcohol that we use for pest control, pest treatment. 70% isopropyl or rubbing alcohol is what we mostly use when it comes to mealy bugs and to scale. It is very effective. It is readily available and it is also cheap. And I've used it for years and years and years without any problems whatsoever. When this little struggling Doria teonopsis, Zorgovivian, started showing the signs on the petals that you can see, I went into a deep dive about alcohol. The reason being, it was alcohol that I used because this orchid came under scale attack last year and the quickest and most effective way to get rid of scale is to use rubbing alcohol. Having only used one component as a treatment, that's why I went to my best friend Google and started to read up about alcohol and I thought there was something super interesting I wanted to share with you. When this orchid was treated it was still quite warm outside. We hadn't reached any cooler temperatures yet and I was very liberal with the alcohol. And I let the alcohol evaporate on the orchid as you do. So having read up on some things with regards to rubbing alcohol and how it affects our orchids, one very interesting factor came to my attention and that was the evaporative cooling effect that alcohol has. When it comes into contact with anything, even if we just apply it on our skin, it cools the skin down and here's the solution to what is going on now with my little sogo bibbian. The evaporative cooling did not match any kind of temperature outdoors that were still relatively warm and destroyed the chlorophyll on the leaves that were treated the most. So you can see here on the right this leaf is pretty pretty bad and this is something I started to observe and I think we can already take it off now. Yep, this is what I started to observe and I thought hang on now. Are there any detrimental effects of alcohol that I have never seen before and if that is the case, why? Here you can clearly see how evaporative cooling of residue alcohol before it even evaporated has killed off the chlorophyll. The orchid cannot photosynthesize. It becomes like very wet tissue and then secondary infections kick in and this would be a fungus starting right here. Now I am not saying don't use alcohol because I'm going to continue using alcohol but you can see the next leaf up also has similar signs not as bad as this one but I treated this one much, much more because the scale was on this one and in the leaf joint over here but you can see how the same symptoms are there and that is chlorophyll dying off. Now what can we do about this? Is there anything we can do? Again, I do not want to say don't use any kind of alcohol for your pests and I'm going to insist that I will continue using alcohol for my pests because that is my go-to the garlic infused alcohol has been an absolute life saver because I do get rid of pests. I was just very heavy handed on this one but you know what? I'm not going to lose the orchid I don't think but I haven't had any scale since the treatment was done. The only thing now I would actually be a lot more aware of is watching my temperatures. For example, right now I am just coming out of the winter I'm heading into spring. My temperatures are still mild enough if I were just to spritz my orchid with some garlic alcohol. I'm not going to be too concerned about the evaporative cooling that the alcohol has on my leaves. Heavy handed alcohol application though from now on I'm going to be so much more on top of it and when I do my applications then I'm going to be wiping excess off because the application of the alcohol hitting the pest takes care of it right then and there and because I've never had this situation before I have never wiped any excess alcohol off. I don't have any other orchid with these symptoms even though I'm very liberal with my alcohol spraying especially when it comes to treatments when it comes to a prevention spritz that's all it is just a prevention spritz but if I'm going to be that liberal especially now as the temperatures rise and I'm going to do a treatment where I'm very generous with the spraying of the alcohol from now on I am going to be wiping excess off. I cannot at this point in time say exactly that it affects all orchids. So far only this phallanopsis has shown signs and symptoms. All my other phallanopsis are absolutely fine. All my other orchids the cat liars etc the den probiums they are fine so it may have something to do with the structure or as the orchid grows in combination with the alcohol but needless to say I wanted to bring this to your attention in case like me you're very liberal with your alcohol watch out for the evaporative cooling effect that it has while it does its thing on the leaves and if there is any excess there is no harm in just wiping that off because the pest will have died by that time. Not sure if this video is helpful for anybody however not putting it out there and you seeing how liberal I am with my alcohol I don't want you to incur similar symptoms and effects and then wonder what is going on. If there is alcohol on the leaves the evaporative cooling will kill the chlorophyll and if it is really bad like in this case it'll introduce secondary infections. Let me know what you think let me know if you've seen similar things happening to your orchids let me also know if you use alcohol as liberally as I do. It will be interesting to get some feedback on this once again I hope this was helpful. I appreciate your time thank you so very very much for watching have yourselves a beautiful day one condition though that you stay safe take care bye you