Does Washing Your Hands Even Work?

The simple answer is yes. Please remember to wash your hands during this virus! You can use this experiment to see why it is so important to wash your hand, and remember to do so for 20 seconds!

Materials:

• Pepper

• Two dishes

• Water

• Soap

Instructions:

• Take some pepper and sprinkle it in one dish of water.

• Fill the second dish with soap and water.

• Dip your finger into the dish with pepper water: this represents dirt collecting on your hands.

• Then, dip that finger into the dish with soap water: this represents you washing your dirty hands.

• Dip your finger back into the dish with pepper water. What happened? The pepper is moving away from your finger!

Science Behind This:

This experiment mimics how by washing your hands with soap, you remove a substantial amount of germs. Soap consists of molecules that have one end of the molecule attracted to the water and the other end attracted to fats and proteins and repelled from the water. Viruses, such as the coronavirus, are encoded by RNA, so when the part of a soap molecule that is attracted to the fat inserts itself, the chemical bonds of the virus are broken, breaking the virus apart. The broken virus becomes insoluble in water, so it disintegrates and can be washed off hands.