I desperately hope this is the case, but a quick google couldn't find a link. Do you happen to have a citation that you'd recommend? I say this as someone who is a bit paranoid about hand cleanliness _and_ is very tired of cracked skin.
Beyond the citation though, it makes logical sense. The mechanism for sanitation is that the soap itself destroys the bacteria. This mechanism works regardless of temperature. Cold water + Soap should be just fine as long as your hands are otherwise visibly clean.
In the food industry, we were required to use high temperature water. This was presumably to remove actual surface contaminants (dirt, grease, other food contaminants) rather than for actual sanitation. That's why you might still see guidelines for using hotter water temperatures.
Does soap actively destroy bacteria, or does it mostly wash the oils off your hands, that bacteria are stuck to/are covered by, and send them down the drain?
I've always been taught it's the latter. Soaping your hands, and not rinsing will not sanitize them, you'll just end up with dirty, soapy hands.
most bacteria have an outer lipid layer that is clung to by the hydrophobic end of soaps and pulled apart by the hydrophilic forces clinging to water on the other end.
Additionally, the soap itself is binding to oils (which often frees up dirt if it was trapping in or under an oily layer, which being hydrophobic will stop water from washing the dirt off). Soap itself doesn’t do a whole lot against dirt.
> Use your preferred water temperature – cold or warm – to wash your hands. Warm and cold water remove the same number of germs from your hands. The water helps create soap lather that removes germs from your skin when you wash your hands. Water itself does not usually kill germs; to kill germs, water would need to be hot enough to scald your hands.
Soap helps break down/encapsulate/dissolve oils/fat that aren't readily soluble in just water.
Which, that breakdown and encapsulation happens faster at higher temperatures - it’s a pretty predictable chemical process. At scalding hot or higher temps, the surfactants can sometimes break down or form weird side products though.
It does happen faster at higher temperatures, but apparently not so much that it makes a difference in terms of cleaning your hands. I'm a bit surprised by that, but that's what studies seem to imply.
Do you have a link to the studies? I definitely notice a huge difference in washing with soap in cold water (camping), which is hard to not leave a film, and warm water which does a pretty effective job quite quickly with the same exact soap.
I didn't encounter any good primary sources, but a few references that seemed to indicate no difference in bacteria reduction between warm/cold water for washing hands. It may be that cold water is simply good enough.
The tricky part here is how the study is constructed. If you take a dry swab with a known bacterial culture, wash in water for x minutes at temp y, and graph it, that might make sense. It just doesn’t reflect real world situations, which almost always involve some kind of biofilm, oil/grease, dirt or similar mass in a complex interaction.
Especially once lipids get involved (almost all hydrophobic), especially in combination with other types of substances like oil soaked dirt or dead skin (like what you get on a doorknob at the micro level), it just doesn’t work the same way on the same timescales with colder temps - it fundamentally can’t, chemistry doesn’t work that way. [https://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/basicrates/temperature....]
If you want the same speed of reaction - aka same amount of oil converted to a not oil - with lower temps (and hence lower molecular velocities and less Brownian motion) you need more reactive chemicals and more aggressive physical action to get compound A in contact with compound B enough to have the reaction you need. It’s as true for soap as it is for anything else.
And this all of course has a giant * on it, since above a certain point the energy in the system causes parts of it to disassociate or form unwanted side reactions, so there is a limit where it ‘blows apart’, ‘crashes’, or ‘can’t stick’ to extend the analogy. I can’t think of any soap that would have that problem at temps within human ‘not going to immediately get 3rd degree burns’ ranges.
I too am a curious dry-skin person. I thought i had read something to the affect of the interaction between soaps and bacteria worked better in warm water than cold.
I'll be really interested if i can avoid warm water.
It’s bit ridiculous to ask for a citation for something as simple as washing hands. You could try for yourself during a week and see if it change something.
