Show of hands: who has become infinitely, intimately more familiar with soap recently? If 2020 was the year we learnt to wash meticulously in between our fingers and all the way up our arms, it was also the year we discovered just how long 20 seconds in front of a bathroom mirror can be.
But have you ever stopped to wonder how the humble bar of hand soap actually works? How does that slippery ‘cake’ invented thousands of years ago remain on par with hand sanitiser or any of the other modern-day cleaning products we wield against a virus that’s become a pandemic?
At its most basic, hand soap is just a combination
