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by refurb 23 hours ago
DMF is quite different than acetone.

As a chemist it’s a highly polar, very high boiling point solvent that is the “go to” when you can’t find a solvent your reactants dissolve in.

Acetone is less polar, more chemically reactive and lower boiling point. It’s rarely used as a reaction solvent due to its reactivity, but it is common in crystallizations.

Both are quite non-toxic (your body makes small amounts of acetone!), but I recall a cancer risk with high exposures of DMF (the example was tannery workers who sprayed it without any safety gear and got soaked).