Hand Sanitizer – A Boring But Vital Prep

Sometimes you just can’t wash your hands, but you can keep them relatively clean with good old fashioned hand sanitizer.

Hand Sanitizer – The World’s Most Boring Prep

So, you take some ethyl alcohol, glycerin to thicken it up and add some water and good smelling fragrances, and you have yourself some hand sanitizer.

The trick of the twister, of course, is the ethyl alcohol, which does the “dirty work” of killing germs. It’s also the limiting factor of shelf life for hand sanitizer, but we’ll come back to that part in a bit.

Does Hand Sanitizer Kill Bacteria, Fungi & Stop Viruses As Well As Soap And Water Does?

Believe it or not, hand sanitizer kills bacteria much better than soap and hot water. Having said that, it’s not nearly as good at getting your hands de-germed as a good hand washing.

Let me explain.

Ethyl alcohol, the active ingredient in hand sanitizes, does indeed kill 99.9 percent of the bacteria it reaches on your hands if you leave it on  for 30 seconds. It also kills many kinds of fungi that get on your hands. Cool, right? Well yes, as far as it goes. 

Viruses are a different matter. Ethyl alcohol hand sanitizer kills many of the viruses out there, but certainly not all of them. It’s nowhere near the efficiency of killing bacteria.

The sanitizer also makes germs of all kinds less likely to stick to your hands if you wipe the sanitizer off of your hands after use. How many of us do that? None. Can you wipe it All off anyway? Nope.

Soap and water don’t kill germs nearly as well as hand sanitizer… but they instead remove those germs by breaking them loose from your skin and washing them down the drain. The hand sanitizer may only leave 1 out of 1000 bacteria alive, but there are a lot of bacteria out there, and efficient removal with soap and water is a more effective overall strategy than using the gels. 

The other problem with the sanitizer is it can’t penetrate well down into really dirty places. If your hands look clean, the sanitizer will do a pretty good job. If they look mud-smeared, you can’t trust the killing power to get down into the muddy bits.

So Why Use Hand Sanitizer Instead Of Washing?

We don’t. We use hand sanitizer when we can’t get to soap and water, and that’s about it. Right now I’m rather stuck in my reclining chair (broken ankle limiting my movement with this giant bottle of hand sanitizer sitting next to me… because it takes a TON of effort to go into the other room to wash my hands.

Salty’s giant bottle of hand sanitizer

Feel The Burn

Like most kinds of alcohol, using hand sanitizer on cuts burns… A LOT. In fact, there’s been many times that I’ve found out I had a cut by putting some hand sanitizer on… and BOOM, there it is. Should you use sanitizer gel to clean a wound then? Well, I would on a fresh wound, if I couldn’t wash. The alcohol will damage Your live cells too though, so putting alcohol gel on every ten minutes to ‘keep it clean’ will do more harm than good.

Let’s Talk Shelf Life

This giant bottle of hand sanitizer I have sitting next to me is about a month old (well, it’s been in our possession a month-ish anyway). The expiration date on it is 06/21 (which makes be think it was manufactured in June of 2018).

That’s a three-year manufacturer’s ex-date, that’s not “long term” but it is plenty of time to store the product.

Like virtually everything with an expiration date, the hand sanitizer will keep working long after that date has come and gone, especially if it had not been opened and the contents exposed to air. 

The biggest risk of hand sanitizes becoming ineffective is if the active ingredient, the ethyl alcohol, evaporates. That should be pretty easy to tell, because by volume in most hand sanitizers the alcohol makes up about 70 percent of the mixture (more or less). Read the label on your bottle to know your exact percentage, I’ve seen it run from 60-73 percent. This Germ-X sitting next to me is 63 percent.

I’ve got one bottle in my desk drawer that had fallen down in the back and had sat there in the dark for 10-years. I opened it up and tried it out, and the cold “alcohol” feel of the sanitizer as well as the texture of the product feels identical to a fresh copy, so I’m assuming that bottles kept sealed-new in a climate control environment away from life have at least that long of a shelf life.

(Spice’s note: The ethyl alcohol itself has a nearly indefinite shelf life. The bottles it comes in might gradually let the alcohol evaporate away. I’d use it with confidence unless the volume had shrunk noticeably or the texture had gone weird…and I don’t mean the ‘lost the bubbles’ weird.)

The Hand Sanitizer Isn’t Good Any More If It Goes Flat?

I had a co-worker who was convinced that she needed a new bottle of hand sanitizer at her desk because hers had “gone flat”.

I have to admit I was both confused and bemused at the same time, as she explained to me that when all of the air bubbles work their way out of the hand sanitizer (which happens if it sits undisturbed for several months) that the stuff no longer was any good.

She was amazed and concerned when I picked up her bottle off of her desk and shook it vigorously, thereby bringing back “her bubbles”. She was not, however, convinced that “bubbling up” her hand sanitizer in this fashion made it good to use again, so I swapped her the one off of my desk which was “naturally still bubbly”. 

(Spice’s note: The bubbles are there, as in hair gel, to make it look cooler and assure the buyer that it’s a ‘good’ thick product they’re buying. They don’t mean anything in particular about quality.)

Conclusion

We keep a hand sanitizer bottle in every vehicle, and we use them often when we are traveling. We still wash our hands before eating, of course, but having the sanitizer keeps us more well in the winter (since we started keeping one in each car, we’ve had a lot less problems with colds and the flu).