Cleanliness is Next to Costliness

Dettol and Lysol are both advertising hands-free soap pumps which are currently top of my list for devices you simply don’t need. Yes friends, the liquid soap you used to squirt into your hands through personal effort is now available not at the press of a button. Lysol pitch the hands-free soap pump with the thought that hands come into contact with millions of germs every day but what about the ‘germs ending up on your soap pump?’

Well what about them? First of all it is standard practice that once you’ve squirted soap into your palm you immediately use it to wash your hands. Surely the microscopic nasties that leap to your finger (just the one) from the top of the soap dispenser are the shortest lived germs of any that you acquire; being, as they are, immediately immersed in germ killing liquid soap and, if you’re any kind of smart, hot water.

When was the last time you squirted the soap into your palm and then thought ‘You know what, I think I’ll walk the dog first,’ and then strolled down the road with a leash in one hand and a glob of liquid soap in the upturned palm of the other? "No I wont shake hands, I'm covered in soap. Could you get the door for me?"

And why focus on this particular source of germs? Never mind door handles, sinks, drains, and other people’s sneezing kids—let’s throw our substantial corporate R&D efforts at the germs that are acquired by the tip of a single finger from the top of a soap dispenser. Stephen King could no doubt turn such an idea into something terrifying but coming from the soap company it just smacks of a desperate need to make money from faux fear.

Anyway, to conquer this tiny and very short-lived threat to our health the solution is, apparently, to prevent us from having to touch the dispenser by encasing it in another dispenser, albeit a high-tech one.

So now we have liquid soap in a non-degradable plastic container, which we put inside another non-degradable plastic container, which only dispenses the soap if we also buy electricity in the form of batteries. Yes, it takes power to get your hands clean.

It is a staggeringly resource-heavy solution for a non-existent problem. Even now Kim Jong Il is kicking himself for not having thought of it first. We are using more plastic and generating more spent batteries and the net result is simply that a single fingertip that is about to be washed anyway, will not be slightly dirtier for a couple of seconds longer than its fellow digits.

What next? A campaign to target the germs that accumulate on the outside of shampoo bottles that are kept in the shower or on the packaging of septic wipes?

If only soap weren’t a liquid. Imagine a world where soap didn’t run everywhere if it found itself outside of the bottle. One day I’m sure science will create soap in a solid state that doesn’t need two dispensers and four AAs. If only soap were solid it could be sold in, Oh I don’t know, maybe a nice convenient bar shape.