I’m told I wash my hands for too long but personally, it seems to me that to get my hands clean, the soap has to be on them for a period of time and perhaps that rubbing my hands together activates it or something but I can’t prove either explanation so I’m cur
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There are (mostly) two types of molecules, polar and non-polar. Polar molecules like to stick to other polar molecules but do NOT like to stick to non-polar molecules. Water is a polar molecule, most things like dirt and grease are non-polar. So they don’t like to stick together. When you just rinse your hands with plain water you can get a good amount of the dirt and grease off with just the mechanical force of the water and rubbing your hands together. But there will be a thin layer of dirt and grease and ick left behind. Soap is one of those special molecules that is neither polar or non-polar. Instead it’s polar at one end, and non-polar at the other! So soap works by the non-polar end sticking to the molecules of dirt and grease, and the polar end sticking to the molecules of water, so when the water flows away it takes the soap and the connected dirt molecule away with it!
So yes the soap does need to be on your hands and rubbed in for it to work, because you need to expose all those dirt molecules to soap molecules so they can attach to each other and then attach to the water to get rinsed away. That’s why sometimes if your hands are really dirty or greasy you may need to wash multiple times, because the top layer gets bonded to the soap and then rinsed away but there’s still more beneath it that didn’t get exposed to the soap.
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