I live somewhere where our tap water feels kinda slimy. Every time my relatives from out-of-state visit our home, they always say that it feels like they haven’t completely washed their hands. As if there’s still soap on their hands.
I’ve noticed that in other states and countries, the tap water isn’t slimy at all. This is bad news cause I have dry skin and the water dries out my skin even more. I have no problem with my facial wash that I use on the daily when I’m at home. On vacation, it irritates my face because of the water.
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Soft water vs hard water
Hard water has higher mineral content.
Soft water can leave your skin and hair feeling like there is product left behind after a rinse – it just doesn’t bind with soap the way hard water does.
Does your area have a municipal well? I would suspect you’re feeling a relatively high amount of dissolved minerals and sulfur in the water that are leaving a residue behind.
Your skin may be used to this, and the relatively pure and highly chlorinated water in places that draw from a surface freshwater source dries your skin out by comparison.
What you’re probably noticing re: washing your hands is water *hardness*.
Soap is, chemically speaking, a salt: it’s the result of reacting the fatty acids in fat with a base. For example, one common molecule in soap is sodium stearate, made by reacting sodium hydroxide (a base) with stearic acid (a fatty acid). The reason soap is this way is that the two halves of the soap molecules have different chemical behaviors, allowing them to both bind to fats (which don’t normally dissolve easily) and to water. That lets them help fats (and other hydrophobic molecules) dissolve in water and be washed away.
Soap itself is soluble, because sodium stearate dissolves easily in water. But depending on where you live, your tap water may contain other elements – most notably calcium – that can replace sodium and form calcium stearate, which is much less water-soluble. This calcium stearate doesn’t wash away and leaves a residue on your hands, which is probably what your relatives are feeling.
In general, we refer to water with high mineral (particularly calcium) content as *hard* water, and other water as *soft* water. Different areas have different levels of natural water hardness because they have different minerals underground, where water is found in aquifers. Areas with, say, a lot of limestone tend to have hard water. Areas with hard-to-dissolve rocks like basalt tend to have soft water.
My guess would be that you live either in Florida or somewhere in the Mountain West or western Great Plains, which tend to have hard water, and your relatives are from the east, southeast, or extreme west coast, where water tends to be softer.
Is the water being treated at a local plant or is it coming straight out of a dam, river, creek, or bore? Water if untreated from a creek that is stagnant could possibly have slime in it, water from a river would be less rare as most rivers are running which usually prevents slime build up, the other one would be water out of a dam on a farm again this water is stannant and could have slime in it, water out of a bore should also be ok.
Most treated water will have chlorine in it, and can sometimes smell of chlorine, but it won’t have slime in it, you can usually get rid of this by using a simple carbon filter although this is only useful for drinking, it’s rather hard to do for a shower or bath. The only other option if the water is like this is you’d have to heat up the water to a temperature that would dispose of any bacteria which is very time consuming. Put it in a big tub like they do in those Western movies where some cowboy is taking a bath, put some heat under it then just scoop up all the slime on top and jump in.
What you are discovering is that water *is* different in different locations.
Water can be sourced from different places that will have different properties, and treated and processed in different ways.
Some sources will have a lot of dissolved minerals in them, others will be more pure, some more or less heavily treated with chemicals, and all of these will affect the way the water tastes and feels.
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