I talk a lot about the products I like on this blog, but here is one that I don’t like!
LYSOL® Healthy Touch® No-Touch™ Hand Soap System
So what’s my beef with something that is supposed to help you maintain clean and healthy hands?
It’s simple: Redundancy.
You just don’t NEED this product.
The Lysol marketing pitch is that this product:
- Automatically senses your hands
- Dispenses the perfect amount of soap
- Provides antibacterial protection!!!!eleventyonee111!!
So that “you and your family will never have to touch a germy soap pump again.”
Pshaw. This is ridiculous.
First of all, the damn system takes FOUR AA batteries. They’re hard to install (yes, I actually set this stupid thing up and used it) and the sensor is a piece of crap. It’s really not as user-friendly as they claim. Multiple times I tried to get it to work, and when it finally did, it really wasn’t as cool as I thought it would be.
Second, it dispenses WAY TOO MUCH SOAP into your hands! So much was wasted down the drain, I felt guilty for trying to be clean! We’re talking gobs here, people. And there was no way to adjust how much was dispensed. We went through the soap refill container lickety-split, when normally a container of that size would last much longer. This wastage is not only bad for your wallet, but doubly-bad for the environment. The packaging was also way more than was necessary.
Third, it’s antibacterial soap. Unless you work in a hospital or doctor’s office there is NO NEED for antibacterial products. Proper hand washing with soap and warm water completes the job just as well without the harmful effects of triclosan and other antibacterial chemicals on your body and the environment. Read about the problems with antibacterial products/additives here.
Finally, it doesn’t matter if the damn soap dispenser is dirty! You’re going to be washing your hands anyway! Holy fear-mongering, Batman!
Overall I am disgusted by this money-grab of a product. They’re washing it with feel-good messages about protecting your family’s health, when it is anything but.
Expensive, hard to set up, redundant, requires batteries, extra soap refills, bad for the body and environment and overly wasteful in design, function and packaging!
This is one fancy gadget we ought to avoid.
/end rant
9 responses to “Product Rant of the Day: Lysol No-Touch™ Hand Soap System”
I think items like this are ridiculous. First of all, we need to be exposed to germs in order to build up immunities and second of all, it is horrible for the environment. Like you said, you go through twice the amount of soap in half the amount of time, you have batteries that are thrown out when they die, goodness knows how much energy it too to manufacture this plastic monstrosity…
bad, bad, bad!
I saw this at the grocery store the other day and couldn't figure out the function of this product….you pretty much summed up what I was thinking…
"Finally, it doesn’t matter if the damn soap dispenser is dirty! You’re going to be washing your hands anyway! "
I am soooooooooo sick of this whole antibacterial nonsense. People are so easily led to live in bubbles and it bothers me. As long as you're washing your damn hands, you will make it through life relatively unscathed. Germs are a part of life but they aren't going to eat us. Jeez.
Amen to that!
LOL the second I saw the add for this, when it came out my first thoughts were: "WTF!!! why woud I care if I have germs on my hands, Im going to wash them right now anyways…. GAWD!!!!" then it sent me into a flying rage about it hahaha well, maybe not quite so dramatic.
The product itself seems cool if you've got chicken hands and crap and you don't want to get your soap all gross and germy in the first place, but the overall selling point of "Never touch a germy soap pump again!" is crap! Hire new people, people!
I bet they are losing a big amount of sales because people think its stupid! I know i haven't bought one because I dont give a crap if my soap pump is germy, I'm about to wash my hands anyways i dont go touching my soap pump for fun, i know its filthy!
Not to be the jerk who disagrees with everyone, but…I'm happy with mine. I didn't buy it for fear of germs; I bought it because my 2-1/2 year old has trouble working a regular dispenser (often knocking over a lot of the girly cosmetic clutter that piles around the sink), and my 8 year old likes to pump the dispenser 5 times despite my having told him that once is more than enough. With a little mechanical aptitude (I realize this isn't everyone, and I acknowledge that this thing could be improved), you actually can take this thing apart and figure out how to reduce the amount of soap dispensed, as I have done. Not that big a deal.
You had trouble installing the batteries? Honestly, what is the world coming to when anything more complicated than a flashlight baffles people?
The battery door comes off easily with no prying or need of tools. There are huge PLUS and MINUS icons molded into the plastic to keep you from installing them backwards.
AND, it comes with batteries pre-installed. Just sayin'.
I was once told that if you give a gold bar to the wrong person they will cuss you for it being so heavy. So that said I think you complainers need to go back to work and do something with your lives instead of just finding something to bitch about. I can understand being upset with the marketing hype but we all have a brain and should be able to weed out the junk from the valuable information. If you cannot filter out the junk then that would scare me also. New items create new sales which help hiring new people. Simple economics.
My wife purchased our dispenser and has definite advantages.
Calm down and use your brain to filter out the value from the junk and don't get scared…
We have had two of these Lysol electric dispensers for about a year. We do NOT buy their refills, obviously (I would think that very few people actually do), but refill like most. My issue is that it dispenses probably 10 times too much soap. I am not exaggerating. It is probably 1 or 2 mL, when the ideal amount would be .05 to .1 mL, so that if you need a tiny amount, like to wash your glasses, you'd let it pump once. If you needed a lot to wash your hands, you'd let it do 2 or 3 pumps.
Chris, can you link us to your mod?