Welcome to my blog! Let’s talk about soap!

Hi!

So for my first post I will write about the importance of washing your hands with soap because I think people should know more about how soap works. (To help make this easy to understand I will add pictures.)

First to understand you have to imagine being a size of a microbe.

And you have to know that soap has a hydrophilic top that means that each soap particle's top is attracted to water and that soap has a hydrophobic tail that repels water like in the picture below.

When you lather up with soap and water, the particles of soap clump together, the tails trying to face away from the water and the tops trying to face towards the water like in the picture above. Sometimes, these clumps form on dirt, germs or any other unwanted particle on your skin. Then, since the heads are pointing towards the water, the soap and anything that it is bonded to get washed away.

Now you may be asking: Doesn’t soap kill viruses and bacteria? Well, yes. You are half right and this is because soap also destroys their membranes. Membranes are a flexible outer layer which are usually found on bacteria and on some viruses like the many coronaviruses we know of today like the novel Covid 19.

Membranes of viruses and bacteria are similar to soap particles because one end of their particle is hydrophobic and the other end is hydrophilic.

When there is water surrounding the membrane, the soap particle cuts into the membrane and the membrane splits open.  So then the virus can not infect your cells and in the case of bacteria they can not survive with out their membrane.

So next time you go to washing your hands make sure you use soap.

Source: https://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/news/howsoapworks/