aren’t all the soaps antibacterial? How come some soaps (e.g. Dove) don’t mention anything about its antibacterial properties?
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The basic principle of how a soap works is that it dislodges foreign bodies from the surface it’s applied on, and then rubbed in, very important, so that they’re suspended in the soap instead of stuck on your skin, or surface you’re cleaning, and they are then washed away along with the soap.
However in practice this is not a perfect process, and soap can’t get anything and everything off. Some things remain on the surface, even if it’s imperceptible to us. Also it might not just be your hands or skin you’re washing but a surface or an appliance. Maybe you’re cleaning with a rag or sponge and just as you’re wiping the dirt and bacteria away you’re putting some back onto the table with the next swipe. So since getting literally everything off is impossible, the next best thing is to have antibacterial soaps which not only wash away bacteria, microbes and the like but also kill them, so even those that may remain are actually dead and not harmful any more.
Of course most soaps out there are also antibacterial soaps nowadays, it’s just that in order to be able to be branded as such they have to have a disinfection rate above a certain benchmark.
Then again not all soaps are antibacterial. For example car soaps do a great job of breaking down and removing the dirt you’ll commonly find in cars, like mud, and debris mixed in with grease or oil or fuel. But they’re not antibacterial, since well their job is to remove the dirt from the car not make it suitable to eat off of.
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