Monday, March 21, 2011

Gah! What A Silly Product

There is an ad for a particular hand soap that has been bothering me lately.

You see, there is a certain brand of liquid soap that has been advertising a new touchless pump and playing up the fact that your kids don't have to touch the dirty top of the pump with this new innovation.

But the thought that occurred to me was what is the very next thing you do after you pushed liquid soap out of a dispenser?

If you are like me and the rest of the civilized world, you wash your hands. So why do you have to really worry about having a dirty pump if the next thing you are doing is rubbing your wet hands together into a lather, thus cleaning them.

But I can just imagine the paranoia that is feeding into, the fear that our hands in our own home can't be contaminated by germs for 2 seconds between when we touch something and when we wash our hands.

In thinking about it, the product that I think would sell like hotcakes is the hand soap that disinfects your taps and door handles immediately after use.

I am wondering if the people in R&D looked at the automatic water taps in public restrooms and thought, "hmm, we could trick the American public with a soap dispenser that does this."

3 comments:

Mayren said...

That's really bad. Honestly the few germs you pickup between the pump and washing your hands are okay in my book. It's also bad to use anti-bacterial soap all the time. If you kill all the germs around you all of the time - then you are killing good ones too. Then you are completely vulnerable to and more apt to catch things like the common cold. There is such a thing as being "too pure". You need a few germs to build up defenses. That's how vaccines are made too - they give a little of the bad to help build your antibodies.

All this and people also don't seem to care that the detergents used in hand-wash are usually horrible for your skin as well.

I'm very versed in Soap and Soap making. These people annoy me.

Jeff said...

Actually they do have self-pumping soap in public restrooms here for the last few years. The advantage I can see there is that the cleaning crew has less to worry about, but other than that... kind of stupid, yeah.

In fact, it's really annoying when you are done washing and accidentally put your hand under the soap sensor, which spits the soap onto your hand again. I've even had it spit it onto my arm as I'm washing my hands. Poor placement is to blame there.

MC said...

Mayren: Yes, since it is the time that you spend washing your hands which is more important than if your soap is AB or not.

Jeff: I can see this technology being used in public because frankly, there are more than a few people out there that would wreck a normal pump for the rest of us, so in that situation, it makes sense. However, at home, where you basically know everyone who is going to be using it, it seems a little over protective and weird.