Know the Quality Of Your Hand Sanitiser With these Easy Tests At Home

Not sure about the quality of your hand sanitiser? Take a quick test at home by following these simple tips. Maintaining proper hand and respiratory hygiene plays an important role in the fight against COVID-19. To achieve this, hand sanitisers and masks are essential. However, even as we wonder at the effectiveness of a hand sanitiser, fake products have flooded the market, risking thousands of lives. So is there a way to check the quality?

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Yes, there are certain cost-effective ways to ensure the quality, as suggested by Dr Saurabh Arora, founder, https://www.Testing-lab.com. One of the way we are going to tell you today.Read on:

What you need?

Tissue paper roll (toilet paper)

Ballpoint pen – Make sure the ballpoint pen you use for conducting this test is not water washable. Do not use a gel or ink pen.

Anything with which you can draw a small circle, such as a coin or even the cap of your sanitiser bottle can work just fine.

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The Tissue Paper Test

Simple Method

Take a small piece of tissue paper and keep it on a flat surface. It is important you do not make a thick wad of the tissue paper as you want the sanitiser to defuse sideways only and not down into the tissue paper.

Use a ballpoint pen and carefully draw a circle on the paper by outlining a coin or the cap of the hand sanitiser bottle. Make sure the line is continuous, thick and clear.

Place a few drops of the hand sanitiser liquid or gel in the middle of the circle. Be careful not to pour too much sanitiser that it overruns the line, nor should it be too little that it doesn’t diffuse past the line.

Let the hand sanitiser slowly diffuse and move out of the circle. The liquid sanitiser will diffuse almost instantly while the gel-based will take some time.

You can also repeat this with a little bit of water to see how a fake sanitiser without alcohol behaves.

Observation

If the sanitiser contains sufficient quantity of alcohol, you will see that the line you had drawn with the ballpoint pen will dissolve in the sanitiser and the colour starts to spread out. However, if the sanitiser does not contain the required quantity of alcohol, the line will not be dissolved and the sanitiser will just defuse past the line without any change.

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How does it work?

This simple test is based on the principle of paper chromatography. The ink which is used in water-resistant ballpoint pen does not dissolve in water but very quickly dissolves in alcohol. This causes the ink to move along the front of the diffusing sanitiser and spreading out. If the alcohol content is less, the solubility of the ink is not sufficient and the line doesn’t move. So,now you can check your sanitiser's quality in a simple way!

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