As shoppers rely on soap to keep their homes & bodies free of germs, it’s important to educate on what they should be looking for in a cleanser to help them stay safe during the pandemic.
Personal hygiene is in the spotlight right now, and that means that consumers are looking for products that will help keep their bodies and their homes clean, safe & virus-free. Regular handwashing is a critical part of protecting you & your loved ones from contracting COVID-19, but with all of the cleansing options available in a crowded marketplace, it’s important that brands let their customers know what available products will work for them at this time.
Wayne LaBonte, Twincraft Skincare’s VP of Sales & Marketing, noticed a trend with many of his bar soap & skincare customers. Over the last couple of weeks, he found that they were asking him about the difference between hand soap and body wash, as many shoppers are scouring shelves to stock up on hand soap, but often don’t realize that body washes and other cleansers can have similar germ-busting benefits that we get from bar soap.
Hand Soap vs. Body Wash
The real difference between hand soap, body washes, and other skin cleansers lie around the surfactants used in each formula, their respective formula pricing, fill sizes, preferred packaging format, and the nomenclature used for each option.
We offer a variety of surfactants for liquid formulations, including coconut, hemp, and sustainably sourced palm surfactants
From a functional standpoint, true soap and other surfactants act in a similar fashion. Both soap and other surfactants have hydrophilic and lipophilic characteristics, and they have a similarly destructive effect on the phospholipid bilayer membrane that surrounds a virus such as COVID-19.
What consumers need to understand is that no matter what type of cleanser they use, washing their hands with either a “hand soap” or a “body wash” is beneficial to slowing or preventing the spread of this and any other virus. Bar soap will be the most effective and destructive cleansing option because it has the highest ratio of active cleanser, but any of these options will ultimately offer the same benefits if they are used in accordance with CDC guidelines – at least 20 seconds of active washing with water is required.
Twincraft Skincare has manufactured bar soap for nearly 50 years at our Winooski, Vermont factory, and we have a wide range of capabilities, aesthetic options, and natural ingredient stories that can be added to sustainable soap base and brought to market as a bar soap for your brand. In recent years, we added liquid skincare manufacturing to our long list of capabilities. To learn more about the ways that we can support your brand with both bar soap and liquid soap manufacturing, please contact our Sales team.