Like, it just goes on your skin and you wash it off. Is there something special in the soap that attacks bacteria specifically?
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Soap on general doesn’t outright kill bacteria (although it can mess with with cell wall, IIRC, if someone knows please correct or elaborate). You put additives in soap that do.
What soap does is that it dissolves in water, but also attracts fats. So while fats and oils normally do not mix with water, soap enables that. This allows you to wash off any fatty, organic dirt with water, which would otherwise just flow over and off it, without picking it up. And this dirt includes bacteria.
Soap, when talking about the smallest pieces of it, is made up of 2 ends. The one end “likes” water while the other end “likes” oil. These pieces all line up and form a ball. The outside of the ball is all the water-liking ends and the inside is all the oil-liking ends. Dirt and oils get trapped inside the ball and then water washes it away.
Soap molecules have an end that sticks to water (hydrophilic) and an end that sticks to oils (hydrophobic). A bacteria’s cell membrane, which is basically its skin, is made up of molecules with a very similar structure. Due to this similarity soap molecules can mix into the bacteria’s cell membrane, which breaks it open and kills the bacteria.
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