Carrying hand sanitizer around has become common practice for those looking to keep their hands free of germs as much as possible. After all, these tiny bottles of alcohol-based gels are easy to carry around and pull out to use when soap and water isn’t available. But should you use hand sanitizer in your home?
Using Soap and Water
Firstly, the best way to stop spreading potentially harmful germs is to wash your hands the old-fashioned way: with soap and water. Generally, it’s just more effective than washing them with hand sanitizer
Ensuring that your hands remain clean can help to keep you and people you come into contact with from getting such. Many infectious diseases transmit from one person to another through indirect contact, like touching objects that were also touched by someone who carries germs or who is sick. When someone comes into contact with potentially harmful germs and then touches their nose, eyes, mouth, or a break in their skin, they can fall ill.
Soap and water is advised over hand sanitizer, as sanitizers aren’t strong enough to kill some potentially harmful bacteria like Clostridium difficile, although it can be removed by simply washing your hands with soap and water.
When it comes to effectively killing germs, the water’s temperature or the particular soap that you use isn’t that important. Of course, you need to wash your hands properly, so you should focus on how vigorously and how long you wash your hands for.
When to Use Hand Sanitizer
While you should always wash your hands when available, it isn’t realistic to go to the bathroom or to the kitchen every time you make contact with a surface in your home. So, at least during flu season, or in the event of a pandemic, it wouldn’t hurt to have a bottle of hand sanitizer available if you’re doing some work in the garage or garden and your hands are touching all sorts of surfaces.
If it isn’t possible to wash your hands using soap and water, you should use a hand sanitizer that’s at least 60% alcohol. The Centers for Control and Prevention and Disease (CDC) has recommended an alcoholic gel as a valid alternative. You should put a large amount of sanitizer on your palm and rub your hands vigorously, ensuring to coat all surfaces. Essentially, you should cover the entire surface of your hands and rub until they’re completely dry, which takes around 20 seconds.
You should essentially wash your hands with sanitizer the same way you would with soap and water, getting right in between your fingers, and opening your palm so that you can position your nails as you normally would. Finally, you should allow the sanitizer to air dry.
The production of hand sanitizer in the U.S. is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure that commercial sanitizers contain at least 60%.
It isn’t easy to measure the amount of alcohol in a homemade sanitizer, which explains why commercial sanitizers are recommended.
Making Your Own Hand Sanitizer
Commercially-made sanitizer, however, undergoes a quality control process in order to ensure that it includes effective alcohol content. However, while not as effective as commercially available sanitizer, making your own hand sanitizer is likely a better option over nothing at all.
This is one issue with homemade hand sanitizer: it’s difficult to know the precise alcohol content. There are recipes online to show you how to make homemade sanitizer. The problem is that they can be easily contaminated with an ingredient that shouldn’t be in there, or the wrong measurement, or an amount of alcohol insufficient to get rid of germs. If you do decide to make sanitizer at home, ensure that you are operating in a clean space, using clean tools, and that you wash your hands vigorously before you begin the process.
If you decide to go ahead and try making your own sanitizer, it may not be as plain sailing as you believe, however. The two key ingredients- aloe vera gel and rubbing alcohol- aren’t the easiest products to find. And once they’ve been mixed together, the result doesn’t feel, or even look, like the real deal.
Some hand sanitizer recipes doing the rounds on social media recommend using vodka, as opposed to rubbing alcohol, but vodka contains only around 40% alcohol, which is too low. And industrial grade 99% alcohol, which is used to clean electronics, isn’t meant for human use. So please don’t use it on your skin.
I thought about making my own hand sanitizer, but it was just as difficult to find alcohol as to find hand sanitizer where I live. I try to wash my hands as often as possible.
For me, I’ll just keep the hand sanitizer for when I’m out and about (which is not often for me). I’ll just keep with the soap and water.
This was super informative to read. We have hand sanitizer around the house but I prefer to wash my hands like a doctor several times a day. I haven’t attempted to make my own hand sanitizer but it is good to know what kind of alcohol to use.