Can a soap be dirty? In a sense that there are still some bacteria living on it.
In: Chemistry
There will be some persisting bacteria on soap in any giving circumstance – some as spores – but soap generally has very good antibacterial properties which make it almost impossible for bacteria to live and thrive, yet there will be a few that resist.
EVERYTHING has bacteria unless it’s completely sterilized. Soap isn’t supposed to kill bacteria unless it’s anti-bacterial soap.
Bars of soap do get “dirty”. A bar of soap helps clean your hands and body by latching onto grease, dirt, and oil more strongly than your skin does. When you’re using soap you’re washing away those loose, dirt-trapping, dirty soap molecules.
A bar of soap does not clean itself, however. A Bar of soap gets cleaned by scrubbing. It’s the same mechanical action that you use to clean yourself when you wash your hands, So you should also rinse off the soap bar before you put it back instead of leaving it covered in the soap suds from cleaning yourself.
Yes. Soap doesn’t kill bacteria, it just helps wash everything stuck to your body down the drain. Naturally, lots of bacteria will have stuck to a bar of soap after you touch it.
Soap needs water to work. It does that by “wrapping up” particles of grime, bacteria and so forth in small balls of soap molecules. Those balls float around in the water you’re washing in and get rinsed away, taking the dirt with them. But to make those balls, the soap molecules need to be in water, both because that’s part of why they make balls in the first place and also simply to be able to move about and cluster. So everything works when you lather the soap up in water, but if the soap’s in a solid bar, it doesn’t. So whatever’s on the surface of the bar is free to stay there.
There’s cleaning, disinfecting and sterilizing. A bar of soap just cleans, and does so by removing dirt and oil.
There are medicated body washes that fight bacteria for things like acne, but plain old soap won’t do all that.
So no, it is clean as long as you wash it off after use, but it is not disinfected or sterile and neither are you. Which is fine.
Source
-worked in infection control in a hospital
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/01/is-soap-self-cleaning-because-it-s-soap.html
*How clean is bar soap in a public bathroom? Is it “self-cleaning,” since it’s soap? It seems like a health hazard to me.*
>It’s dirty, but that doesn’t make it a health hazard. Soap can indeed become contaminated with microorganisms, whether it’s in liquid or bar form. According to a series of tests conducted in the early 1980s, bars of soap are often covered with bacteria and carry a higher load than you’d find inside a liquid dispenser. But no one knows for sure whether this dirty soap will actually transfer its germs to your hands during a wash.
> In fact, what little clinical evidence there is suggests that dirty soap isn’t so bad. A study from 1965 and another from 1988 used similar methodologies: Researchers coated bars of soap in the lab with E. coli and other nasty bacteria, and then gave them to test subjects for a vigorous hand-wash. Both teams found no transfer of contamination from the dirty soap. However, both studies were tainted by potential conflicts of interest: The first was conducted by Procter & Gamble, and the second came from the Dial Corp.
>Still, there’s no good evidence to contradict these studies, and it’s likely that the bacteria on a dirty bar would just wash off when you rinsed your hands. In other words, you’d be cleaning the soap as you cleaned your hands. (Your hands would probably have been a lot dirtier than the soap to begin with.)
Definitely. Soap removes bacteria mechanically, meaning they make the bacteria slippery, causing it to flow away when you rinse. Therefore, bacteria won’t die on the soap. They can only slide around.
A lot of misinformation here.
First of all, domestic-use anti-microbial soap is notoriously bad at removing bacteria. Some studies show zero benefit over normal soap.
Secondly, of course soap and other detergents disrupt cell membranes, including that of most bacteria. Even your hands will eventually suffer after the layer of dead skin has been removed due to repeatedly washing.
However, the process is not fast, some bacteria might be more resilient, viruses might be completely unaffected, as well as some more exotic bacteria that go into a dormant state where even antibiotics or desiccation will not harm them. They would still be able to sit on a completely dried out bar of soap, waiting to reproduce when conditions improve.
So the answer is: some bacteria and some viruses might be able to live on a bar soap or inside a container of liquid soap, so yes, it might be dirty in the sense of not being sterile.
One of the reasons why surgeons scrub their hands so extensively with soap containing harsh antimicrobial agents, usually chlorhexidine or povidone-iodine, which cannot be found in antimicrobial soap for domestic use. It usually only contains triclosan in low concentrations, which on paper is a good antimicrobial agent, but in practice and in soap doesn’t make much of a difference.
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