What is ant oil?

Answer 1

There is a flood of "Ant oil" or "Ant egg oil" advertisements on the internet at present. You can buy it in any quantity you can afford and get it at short notice. Better make sure that if you try it you really can afford to write off whatever you pay, plus any medical treatment that you need afterwards. It is said to be made from squashed "ant eggs", or more nearly correctly, the pupae from ants' nests, but that sounds about as likely as making it from horse eggs.

Even if that were true, there are thousands of species of ants, and they differ in the chemicals that they produce; for example, some kinds supply the poisons that poison arrow frogs produce and there are many other dangerous poisons that various species of ants produce, so you can't simply trust anything that comes out of just any ant nest. Nor is it practical to produce the many tonnes of material that go onto the market by squashing or distilling or extracting ants, whether mature or eggs or pupae.

In reality the main ingredient in commercial "ant oils" seems to be furfural, otherwise known as furan-2-carbaldehyde. This is a well-known chemical and is commercially important. It gets produced in quantities of thousands of tonnes by various chemical and physical treatments of biological materials such as corn cobs and bran. It is a cheap bulk chemical and is valuable for many reasons, but it is poisonous and is a powerful skin irritant. Personally I would not use it on my own skin, whether to get rid of hair or lice.

If you wish to use it because you are sorry for the poor people who sell it, suit yourself, but don't say it was my idea.