: cleansing with a soap removes dirt and germs, the. what makes a towel dirty when we dry hands with it?
In: Chemistry
I mean, if you wash your hands thoroughly there isn’t going to be a huge amount of grime on the towel. Most people wash their hand towels only periodically, mostly because freshly laundered and fluffy towels are nice, not because their hand towels are filthy
There are germs and mold spores floating around in the air all the time everywhere. Even if you washed your hands to perfect sterility, you’re still going to leave some skin cells on the towel along with the water. So now you have a porous towel surface, with water and food (dead skin cells) hanging there getting landed on by mold and bacteria floating around in the air. Perfect growing surface for any that happen to land on the towel, so eventually the towel goes sour, even if you’re hand washing perfects and not adding any organisms via your hands. The sour smell is the pee and poop of bacteria living in it.
No one washes their hands perfectly, there are too many little crevasses and folds and such to get all the dirt and germs off even if you do the full 30 second routine (not to mention that most people scrub for like 5 seconds). So there’s still dirt and germs on your hands after washing. When you dry with a towel, you scrape some of those dirt and germs onto the towel along with water, which is a perfect environment for the germs to multiply. Add to that the ambient germs floating around in a bathroom and you’ll build up germs on a damp towel very quickly.
there’s bacteria and germs in the air. Bacteria and germs like warm moist things. The towel picks up bacteria and germs from the air just sitting there before it dries.
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