[hilbert42]

It depends on what you mean by mineral oil. Without definition it's about as useless as saying I've painted something in 'color' rather than specifying what color one used.

Whilst flammable, and for the simplest ones, even explosive - most small straight-chained alkanes as often found in mineral oils are reasonably innocuous in that they're not considered organically poisonous (at least in small amounts), however that can change greatly the moment you add certain additives to change their properties (as is often done in commercial products).

The most notorious and outrageous example being when Thomas Midgley Jr added tetraethyllead to gasoline/petroleum in the 1920s thus managing to poison most of the population to at least some extent.