A 473 ml bottle of liquid hand soap from ATTITUDE's Super Leaves range, with white tea leaf extract. Vegan, EWG VERIFIED, and free from parabens, sodium laureth sulfate, PEGs and synthetic fragrance.
Why an ordinary, gentle soap is the right choice. Antibacterial hand soaps sound better and are not. In 2016 the US Food and Drug Administration banned nineteen active ingredients — triclosan and triclocarban among them — from consumer antiseptic washes, on the grounds that manufacturers had failed to show they worked any better than plain soap and water, and that their long-term safety was unproven. Plain soap has never needed defending: it works by physically disrupting the lipid membranes of microbes and lifting soil off the skin so that running water carries it away. Nothing needs to be added to that.
Technique beats product. The single biggest variable in whether hand washing works is how long you do it and whether you cover the whole hand. Twenty seconds, including the backs of the hands, between the fingers, the thumbs and under the nails — the places almost everyone misses. And dry them properly afterwards: damp hands transfer many times more microbes than dry ones.
The problem with washing your hands often. It is genuinely hard on skin. Hand dermatitis is among the most common occupational skin conditions in the world, and it is caused by exactly the thing everyone is told to do more of. The answer is not to wash less but to wash gently — a mild, fragrance-free surfactant like this one, lukewarm rather than hot water, and hand cream after the last wash of the day.
White tea is the least processed form of Camellia sinensis: young buds, withered and dried, never oxidised, so they keep the most of their polyphenols. In a hand soap it is a nice inclusion rather than an active — twenty seconds is not a treatment.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.