They can be found in most public bathrooms and are known to be eco-friendly, but it turns out hand dryers aren’t the most hygienic method to dry your hands.
A scientist has proven why it might be a good idea to opt out of using a hand dryer with one viral post.
Scientist Ruth MacLaren took to her TikTok account @devonscience, where she regularly posts experiments, with a video putting a hand dryer to the ultimate test.
Watch the video above.
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In the video, MacLaren took a petri dish and exposed it to the air of a hand dryer to capture whatever it produced.
To make it a fair test, she also exposed a second petri dish to the air of her laboratory by waving it around in the air.
She left both dishes to incubate overnight and the results were shocking.
The petri dish that she had exposed to the hand dryer had developed “so many different kinds of bacteria and a fungus too,” MacLaren explained in the video.
Meanwhile the one that had simply been exposed to the air grew nothing.
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”And this is why I do not use hand dryers,” she concluded the video as she demonstrated herself drying her hands with some toilet paper instead.
She doubled down on the sentiment taking to the caption of the post writing: “Urghh, don’t use a hand dryer.”
MacLaren’s experiment went viral on the platform and at the time of writing has garnered more than 4.5 million views.
Some commented sharing that the experiment hadn’t been completely fair as she tested the air in her laboratory and not inside the bathroom.
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So she took to the platform with some follow up experiments. In one video she tested the air in the toilet against the air coming out of the hand dryer. In another she compared the bacteria found in the hand dryer and the toilet paper.
Each time the hand dryer produced significantly more bacteria.
In response to the wide-reaching attention her experiment has received on the platform, MacLaren took to her original post with an update.
“Thank you for all your comments and suggestions,” she wrote. “Totally blown away by how far this little video has reached”.’
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