Why is My Hand Sanitizer Sticky?

When you use our hand sanitizer from our 2 oz bottles or sachets, you may notice a slight stickiness on your hands before it dries.

There are two things you should know about this:

Don’t worry! It goes away.

You’ll notice this effect shortly after rubbing your hands together to spread the sanitizer around. The first thing you’ll notice before that is that it’s a little greasy.

The idea is to keep rubbing your hands together for 20 seconds until that slight greasiness gives way to a mild stickiness. Then, in another 30 seconds, you’ll notice that the stickiness is gone and the sanitizer is now protecting your hands for up to the next 4 hours.

This is significantly different from the hand sanitizers you may be used to, which kill the germs that are on your hand currently, when you use it, but once the alcohol dries, your hands are now vulnerable to recontamination. With our benzalkonium chloride hand sanitizers, your hand continues to be protected from new contaminations for hours to come.

This is because of our carefully selected ingredients.

When designing our fortified hand sanitizers, we had a few choices in what products to use as a lubricant (which allows you to easily spread the sanitizer around your hands).

The mostly commonly chosen ingredient for this, that many of our competitors are using, is parabens.

We very specifically didn’t want to use parabens in our products (the reasons for which we’ll talk about more in a minute).

Instead, we chose to use glycerines derived from natural plant sources. These glycerines can be sticky for a minute, but once again, that goes away quickly so that you can continue on with your day safely and comfortably.