What you’ll learn
- Scrub for long enough, and know why there's a required time to wash your hands
- Reach the surfaces most people miss without thinking about it
- Judge when sanitizer will do and when only soap and water will
- Know the moments that call for washing, including both sides of wearing gloves
- Keep your own skin intact, which is a safety measure and not just a comfort
Nobody looks this up because they're unclear on soap. They look it up because somewhere along the way they got the feeling they might be doing it too fast, or missing a spot, or that the version they learned as a kid isn't the version their job now expects. It's a slightly embarrassing thing to check, which is probably why so many people just keep guessing.
The short version: it takes longer than most people spend, and the parts that get missed are the same parts every time.
How to wash your hands: step-by-step
Wet your hands with clean running water. Temperature is a comfort choice, not a safety one — water hot enough to matter is water too hot to keep your hands in.
Lather with soap, away from the running water, so you're not rinsing the soap off while you work.
Scrub every surface for at least 20 seconds — see the next section for the surfaces people skip. This is the step that does the work.
Rinse under running water, letting it carry everything away instead of pooling it in the sink.
Dry thoroughly with a clean single-use towel or a dryer. Drying is part of the procedure, not the end of it.
The 20 seconds isn't a ritual and it isn't a rounded-up guess. It's contact time — soap needs long enough to lift things off your skin and let the water carry them away. That's also why humming something familiar works: it keeps you from cutting the time short, and people who count in their heads almost always undercount when they're in a hurry.
The parts everyone misses
There's a pattern to it, and once you know the pattern it stops being a list to memorize. Your dominant hand does most of the scrubbing, so the places it doesn't naturally reach are the places that stay unwashed.
The backs of your hands — the classic miss, because the scrubbing motion is palm-to-palm.
Between the fingers, including the webbing, which needs interlaced fingers and not just a rub.
Thumbs — they sit outside the way hands naturally clasp, and they get forgotten more than any other part.
Under and around the nails. Nail beds hold onto things longest, which makes short nails a practical decision and not just a dress-code one.
Wrists, especially if you've been wearing gloves — the cuff line is a real boundary and things collect at it.
Sanitizer: when it works and when it doesn’t
Alcohol-based hand sanitizer genuinely works. It's fast, it's there when a sink isn't, and for routine hand hygiene on hands that aren't visibly dirty it does the job. Check the concentration, though — below about 60% alcohol it's doing considerably less than the label implies.
But it isn't a substitute for washing your hands. Two situations matter here, and only one of them is obvious. Sanitizer doesn't work on hands that are visibly dirty or greasy — it has to reach your skin, and it can't get through a layer of something else. And there are germs it doesn't reliably kill, which soap and running water handle by physically washing them away instead of trying to destroy them.
If you've been treating the two as interchangeable, that's a reasonable habit to have formed. Most workplaces put the dispenser by the door and the sink down the hall — which quietly teaches everyone the wrong habit — and years of public messaging pushed sanitizer hard without ever mentioning where it stops working.
The moments that call for it
The trigger list is more useful than the technique, because technique fails far less often than remembering does.
Before you put gloves on, and after you take them off. The second one surprises people — gloves aren't a substitute for washing, and hands come out of them warm and damp.
After any contact with blood or body fluids, whether or not you were wearing gloves.
After cleaning, after handling waste, and after taking off any protective equipment.
Before eating, drinking or smoking, and before touching contact lenses or putting on makeup — all of which take your hands to your face.
The gloves reminder is worth remembering and thinking about, because it's where this lesson leads into the next one. Gloves fail sometimes, invisibly, and the way they come off decides where anything on them ends up. Washing afterward is what covers both.
Looking after your own skin
This is the part nobody searches for and everybody in a hands-on job eventually needs. Washing your hands twenty times a day is hard on skin. It strips the oils out, and skin that's been stripped often enough cracks — around the knuckles, at the fingertips, along the sides of the thumbs.
Cracked skin is broken skin, and broken skin is one of the routes all of universal precautions is organized around. Which leaves you with an awkward loop: the thing you're doing to stay safe, done often enough without care, quietly moves you into a higher-risk category.
That's not a reason to wash less. It's a reason to treat moisturizer as part of the job instead of a nicety — a fragrance-free one, used through the day rather than as a rescue at the end of it. And any cut or crack you already have gets covered with a waterproof bandage before you start work, not after something lands on it.
Put it into practice
Training scenario:
You are covering a shift for a friend, and it's short two people. You've just finished dealing with a cut hand — gloves on, bandage applied, gloves off, everything into the right trash can. There's a sink about ten feet away and a sanitizer dispenser mounted on the wall right beside you. Your phone is buzzing, someone is calling your name from the next room, and your hands look perfectly clean.
Walking it through:
The detail that settles it is the cut hand. You've had contact with blood — through gloves, but contact is what the rule tracks, and gloves fail in ways you don't notice. That puts this squarely in the soap-and-running-water case, and "my hands look clean" doesn't prove anything: nothing you're trying to wash off is visible.
So it's the sink, and it's the full twenty seconds even though someone's calling for you. If you genuinely can't leave the room this second, use the sanitizer and wash properly at the first chance you get — that's a reasonable stopgap, not a substitute you got away with. And when you're back at the sink, spare a thought for the third thing this shift has cost you: hands washed this often, this fast, all week, are hands that will crack by Friday.
Medically reviewed by Dr. Mary Williams, RN, DC
Check yourself
Three questions on what you just read.