aren’t all the soaps antibacterial? How come some soaps (e.g. Dove) don’t mention anything about its antibacterial properties?

Question

aren’t all the soaps antibacterial? How come some soaps (e.g. Dove) don’t mention anything about its antibacterial properties?

In: 149

Answer 1

All soaps have the property of weakening bacterial cell walls, and washing microbes off surfaces, but in terms of a legal definition they don’t hit that 99.9% kill rate that’s considered antibacterial. Soaps with additives such as triclosan and the like do generally kill at a much higher rate, but they come with their own issues such as breeding resistance in the surviving populations of microbes.

So in practice anti-bacterial soap is regular soap with one of these additives specifically designed to be antimicrobial. Such additives might also leave a residue that has the property of temporarily halting bacterial growth, so-called bacteriostatic action.