During the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to develop a good habit of washing hands frequently. Keeping your hands clean helps prevent the spread of germs so that there would be less risk for you to get sick. Hand-washing is also a healthy habit in the kitchen. It is one of the most important things you can do to prevent food poisoning when preparing food for yourself or your loved ones. Washing your hands frequently with soap and water is an easy way to prevent germs from spreading around your kitchen and to other foods. That said, you should also prepare some hand soap in the kitchen for hand-washing. So, is the sink soap dispenser for hand or dish soap?

Should You Have Hand Soap in the Kitchen?
There are many situations in the kitchen that you need to wash your hands to keep germs away from food:
- Before, during, and after preparing any food, your hands are in direct touch with food, so it is necessary for you to clean your hands.
- After handling uncooked meat, seafood, poultry, or eggs, you have to do the hand-washing because these kinds of food are always loaded with bacteria and even parasites.
- After touching garbage, there is no need to say, you should wash your hands right away. The trash bins are a breeding ground for hundreds of millions of germs, which we will inevitably touch when cleaning up our kitchen waste.
- Before having meals, it is common sense to wash your hands. Even if you just sit in a place to wait for meals, please clean your hands. You’re eating with your hands, and you don’t know when germs are getting into your mouth.
- After coughing, sneezing, and blowing your nose, you will get your hands full of germs. Please wash them immediately.
- After playing with your pets or touching with the pet food and pet treats, you are supposed to do a hand-washing. There are many different kinds of bacteria that would attach to the fur of your pets so remember to wash hands after touching them.
Combined with the above, preparing food in the kitchen can expose you to germs in a variety of ways, so washing your hands in the kitchen is essential. Therefore, the hand soap should be prepared in the kitchen for hand-washing at any time.
What Should I Put in My Kitchen Sink Soap Dispenser?
There is always a debate about whether the kitchen sink soap dispenser should be filled with hand soap or dish soap. Someone holds the view that the sink dispenser is definitely for dish soap because washing hands with dish soap is OK. But others say that it is for the hand soap since we need to wash hands frequently in the kitchen. To this controversy, what we need to know is: can dish soap and hand soap replace each other? If hand sanitizer and dish soap were interchangeable, the debate would disappear.
Can you use hand soap to wash dishes?
Nothing terrible would happen if you use your liquid hand soap to wash your dishes. Something you should care about is whether the hand soap can wash off the grease from the dishes. The hand soap is mainly designed for washing our hands so it is more gentle than dish soap. So you might not get your dishes as squeaky clean if you use hand soap to wash them. Also, hand soap always has additives like moisturizers, fragrance, and dyes. As a result, you should rinse your dish well if you use hand soap for cleaning your dishes to avoid leaving any additives. Otherwise, that would definitely bring a bad effect on your health and that of your family.
Does dish soap work like hand soap?
Not like the hand soap, the dish soap is harsh and has strong detergency to cut through the grease. It contains some high irritant additives like phosphates and bleach. Just as it would clean the grease from your plates, the dish soap may strip the natural oil on your hands. You would find your hand skin becomes dry if you use the dish soap in place of hand soap. To those with allergies or sensitive skin, this may even cause their hands to be prone to chap or eczema. Therefore, dish soap can replace hand soap temporarily if you have nothing else alternative, but not for long.
So which is the kitchen sink soap dispenser for? Hand soap or dish soap? The answer is obvious–both hand soap and dish soap. Then you may have more questions. Should I prepare two dispensers for different soap? What should I do if don’t have enough space for setting another dispenser? What kinds of soap would be good for hand washing and dishwashing? Don’t worry, read on and you will get the answer!
You May Like: How To Clean Kitchen Sink: Tips For Sparkling Cleanliness
Best Soap for Kitchen Sink
There are different types of hand soap and dish soap for you to select. And which kinds of soap do you choose will make influence to how you design your kitchen sink soap display.
Liquid Hand And Dish Soap
Liquid soap is the most common soap to use. Many brands of liquid hand soap and dish soap are widely available on the market. If you would like to have both liquid hand soap and liquid dish soap stored together near your sink, there is a dispenser designed especially for this purpose. You may want to buy liquid soap in plastic bottles but this is not recommended. You can buy a refillable soap bottle, and this also helps minimize your impact on the environment. With the refillable dispenser, you don’t have to continue to buy the disposable plastic soap dispensers and can instead purchase one large refill bottle.

Foam Soap
The foam soap is a diluted liquid soap. There is only one thing different between these two kinds of soap. The foam soap comes out of your pump as a lather directly but you need to rub your palms to lather if using liquid soap. In this regard, it seems that the foam soap is more convenient for us. If you want to put both foam hand soap and dish soap in your kitchen, you may have to prepare two soap dispensers special for foam soap. It would be better if they come with tags that you can distinguish from.

Bar Soap
Both liquid soap and bar soap are effective against bacteria and viruses, but some are more used to bar soap. Choosing which kind of soap simply comes down to personal preference. The friction created by rubbing bar soap against your hands can exactly be more effective at removing visible debris like dirt. If you prefer bar soap to liquid soap, you may have to put a soap dish near your kitchen sink to accommodate your bar soap.

All-in-one options
There are some products formulated to succeed in both cleaning hands and washing dishes. You can choose this kind of product so that you don’t have to prepare two soap dispensers for different soap. Having a built-in soap dispenser would be the best! This will save you some room.

You May Like: What To Do When Bathroom Sink Smells Like Rotten Eggs?
FAQ
Question: Can you add a soap dispenser to a sink?
Answer: Adding a built-in kitchen sink soap dispenser can be quite easy when your kitchen sink comes with an extra hole for it originally. You just need to choose a proper soap dispenser pump and insert it into the existing hole. However, when there is no extra opening on your sink, you can cut one in order to add the soap dispenser.
Question: Are built-in soap dispensers worth it?
Answer: Yes, the built-in sink soap dispenser is worth it since they provide a space-saving option for the kitchen.
Question: Can you replace the sink sprayer with soap dispenser?
Answer: Of course! You can remove the built-in separate faucet sprayer and its empty hole will be the perfect position for the soap dispenser.