44 HYGIENE


Routes to happy hand hygiene formulations


Julie Ross – Croda Personal Care, UK


With COVID-19, the past twelve months have been all about hand hygiene, and this is likely to be the case for the foreseeable future. The pandemic has highlighted just how important hand hygiene is, with health experts citing it as a key weapon of protection and according to Mintel, 81% of all adults in the UK have said that they have washed their hands more frequently as a result. Although soap is by no means a new phenomenon, surprisingly hand hygiene for health reasons is actually a more modern-day practice.


A history lesson A brief journey through history shows that the earliest soap was being made in around 2800BC and the first industrial manufacture of soap was 1700AD, but it is not until the twentieth century that commercially available soap was made. Handwashing has been a central component


of personal hygiene and a religious and cultural custom for many years, but the link between handwashing and health was made less than two centuries ago by Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor working in the Vienna General Hospital. Florence Nightingale also emerged as a handwashing champion, implementing handwashing and other hygiene practices in the war hospital in which she worked, achieving a reduction in infections. Sadly these practices were not widely adopted, and it was not until the 1980s when a string of foodborne outbreaks and healthcare associated infections led to public concern and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified hand hygiene as an important way to prevent the spread of infection. In recent years, handwashing with soap and other forms of hand hygiene have been gaining recognition as a cost-effective, essential tool for achieving good health. We have seen that not


only soap has been employed as a tool for the fight against Coronavirus with hand sanitisers containing at least 60% alcohol also being widely used. Alcohol has been used as an antiseptic


since the late 1800s when evidence of its antimicrobial properties was discovered, and it was introduced into surgical procedures and for surface disinfection. Gel hand sanitiser was invented in 1966 by nursing student Lupe Hernandez who discovered that alcohol could be delivered in a gel format. Originally used in hospital settings, it became commercialised in the


PERSONAL CARE May 2021


1990s but sales did not really start to take off until the 2000s. In 2002, the CDC revised its guidelines to recommend alcohol-based sanitisers as an alternative for health care personnel to use, and throughout the 2000s, hospitals around the world started the widespread practice of placing hand sanitiser pumps throughout medical facilities. In 2009, the World Health Organisation followed suit, promoting the use of alcohol-based hand sanitiser among healthcare professionals, especially in countries with limited access to water. Prior to the global Coronavirus pandemic,


there had been a move globally to promote hand hygiene as a means to prevent the transmission of germs and disease. The world’s hygiene and sanitation experts from the public and private sectors joined together to create the Global Public Partnership for Handwashing in 2001, later to become the Global Handwashing Partnership. Its purpose was to implement effective approaches and methodologies for achieving large-


scale handwashing behaviour change and there have been many global initiatives as a result. Global Handwashing Day was first established in 2008 and has taken place on 15 October every year since. This has resulted in an increasing number of governments implementing policies and programmes that encourage handwashing with soap. A topic that was once not taken seriously


has become a strategic government policy in many countries with government-based trends that have included political leaders promoting handwashing with soap, behaviour change integrated into school curriculums and teacher training programmes, and national campaigns.


The battle of the soaps – bar soap or liquid soap? Euromonitor’s Global 2020 Beauty Survey shows that nearly all consumers (93%) wash their hands at least twice a day, and over half of them do so for five or more times per day. It also shows that even though daily handwashing is a near universal habit amongst global consumers, those about the age of 35 are more likely than their younger counterparts to wash their hands at least five times per day. These numbers may mirror greater levels of concern over infection among older consumers. Women are also more likely to be frequent handwashers with 65% reporting washing their hands at least five times a day, compared with only 54% of men. So which soap is best – liquid soap or bar


soap? Up until the 1980s, bar soap was the norm. In the 1980s, manufacturers became more able to source pump bottles cheaply and liquid soap began to grow in popularity with a steady rise in liquid soap launches over the past five years. Bar soaps became steadily less popular with people believing them to be less hygienic and harbouring germs, leaving a messy residue, and just plain old-fashioned. According to Mintel, there was somewhat


of a resurgence in the humble bar soap, with a steady growth in launches up to 2018. It could be said that the sustainability aspect of bar soaps lasting longer than their liquid counterparts making them most cost-effective, in using minimal packaging and a waterless format made people reconsider whether liquid soaps were the best way to stay clean. Added to this is the development of more prestige brand bar soaps that smell divine and have added skin care benefits.


www.personalcaremagazine.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92