Zinc white warning!

[Richard Bingham]

Intense!!
(I know you know your whites . . . )

[David Clemons]

The results of this report are nothing new, ultimately inconclusive, and rather superficial, in my understanding. The concern of the brittleness of zinc has been common knowledge for a long time. Even Ralph Mayer has that documented. The article also doesn't expand the results into other binders besides oil, like arcylics or watercolors, where zinc has been in use longer. The conclusions are only that it MAY point to early failure, and yet some early users of zinc grounds have held up well. To me, that is evidence of the need to examine how to use it properly, not cry that the sky is falling. One benefit of zinc in manufacturing is it doesn't darken when mixed with sulphur. My worry now is that companies will also react inappropriately. Lord help us if they start to look at titanium. We may be left with no whites at all.

[David Clemons]

There's no shortage of warnings out there from much older studies that zinc makes a brittle film. Some of them are footnotes to the article itself. I do appreciate that they spent 28 years to confirm what was already known, but it might have served us better had they expanded the study a bit more. Also, the delamination they observed apparantly only happened with oils applied to an acrylic primer.