Gentle Hand Wash

Details

A plain surfactant hand wash for hands that are washed all day, at a clinic, a kitchen or a desk. It cleans on coco-glucoside and cocamidopropyl betaine at pH 5.5 and leaves glycerine at 5 percent and panthenol behind. There is no antibacterial agent in it, and that is the point of the listing. The claim this category is built on is kills 99.9 percent of germs, printed with no organism named, no contact time and no test method, which makes it a sentence nobody can check and nobody can disprove. A real kill claim reads like this: log reduction against a named organism, at a stated contact time, by a stated method. We make no kill claim at all, because a plain wash and twenty seconds of rubbing under running water removes soil and transient organisms perfectly well, and because the two agents usually used to earn the claim both carry baggage. Triclosan was removed from consumer antiseptic washes in the United States in 2016 for want of evidence that it beat plain soap; the commonest replacements are chloroxylenol and benzalkonium chloride, and a hand wash reformulated to be triclosan-free while adding one of those has removed a word rather than a problem. There is neither in this bottle.

• No triclosan and no triclocarban, and no replacement antiseptic either. No chloroxylenol, no benzalkonium chloride, no alcohol
• No kill claim. We do not print a percentage because we have not run an organism-and-contact-time test to earn one
• Full INCI in descending order: Aqua, Coco-Glucoside (5.5 percent), Cocamidopropyl Betaine (4.0 percent), Glycerin (5.0 percent), Sodium Cocoyl Glutamate (2.5 percent), Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice (1.0 percent), Panthenol (0.8 percent), Xanthan Gum, Sodium Benzoate, Citric Acid, Potassium Sorbate, Sodium Phytate
• Total active surfactant matter 12.0 percent, tested. That figure is worth asking any hand wash for, because thinning with water and rebuilding the thickness with salt is how this category cuts cost invisibly
• Preservative named, not hidden: sodium benzoate at 0.5 percent with potassium sorbate at 0.3 percent, which work only below about pH 5.5 and are the reason the pH is held there. No methylisothiazolinone and no formaldehyde donor, the two preservatives a paraben-free wash is most often quietly switched to
• Fragrance-free, with nothing masking it either. No parfum, no essential oil, no masking agent, so it smells faintly of its own surfactants
• Measured pH 5.5, which is where skin sits, and it matters more in hard city water where an alkaline wash leaves a film
• Tested fill: 250 ml net, filled by weight to 255 g at a measured density of 1.020 g per ml, checked per lot. The 750 ml pouch is filled to 765 g on the same basis
• Honest trade-off: with no sulphate in it the lather is moderate and it takes a second longer to feel like it is working. A big lather is a marketing decision, not a cleaning one
• Second trade-off: if you need an actual antiseptic, for a clinical procedure or a sick household, this is not it. Use an alcohol rub at 70 percent, which does carry a real kill claim with a real contact time