Soap how does it work

Learn more about skin health and how to maintain healthy hands here. Here at Meritech, we have designed a fully automated handwashing station that will achieve more than Don't know where to start? We can help! How Soap Works.

How does soap remove germs and pathogens during the handwashing process? Over 11s. Under 11s Technology. Chemistry chaos. Our world. Our bodies. What do you know about? Soap - how does it get things clean?

Soapy surprise! How does soap work? What you need: Jam jar or other small container with lid Cooking oil Water Washing up liquid How to: Put some cooking oil and water in the jam jar. The earliest recorded evidence of the production of soap dates back to around BC in ancient Babylon. Long before humans understood modern chemistry or biology, they noticed that certain materials, when mixed with water, did a much better job of cleaning than water alone.

At the most basic level, soap is a special type of salt derived from vegetable or animal fats or oils—for example, tallow rendered beef fat , coconut oil, and olive oil are all popular soap bases. The oil or fat is combined with an alkaline metal solution, which breaks it down into the salt.

Depending on additives, byproducts, and materials used, the final soap product can be solid, liquid, thick, thin, oily, or greasy. All types of soap do the same thing: remove dirt and the disease-causing germs it contains. So, how does soap clean the dirt, grease, and oils off of your hands?

This is important to understand for handwashing, because when disease-causing germs in fecal matter or dirt get on your hands after using the toilet or touching a contaminated surface, they mix with the natural oils on your skin and stay there. The water slips right off without mixing, just like it does with cooking oil.

Because soap is salt derived from an oil or fat, it has a unique chemical structure that looks like a balloon. The soap molecule can therefore act like a double-agent: the salty end is attracted to water, while the fatty tail is attracted to the dirt or oil. When you mix soap with dirt and water, the soap molecules break up the dirt and the bacteria it contains by forming circles around individual droplets—the fatty chains go in the middle facing the dirt, while the salt balloon tops form the outside of the circle facing the surrounding water.

The other side of the soap molecule the red part is hydrophilic, meaning that it loves water, so as you apply water to your soapy hands this side of the molecule attaches to the water. As the water washes the soap bubbles away it effectively picks up all the dirt, oil and pathogens from your hands and washes them away.

This is why soap is such an effective defence against all pathogens. It is important to remind people that they need to rub hands thoroughly and create a lot of lather so the soap can get into all the cracks and crevices in skin where the virus likes to hide. So when the hydrophobic end of the molecule comes in contact with this fatty membrane it causes it to dissolve and fall apart, thus destroying the virus.