Every person I have every lived with outside of my family, had the bad habit of using far too much dish soap. Here is some basic information that I keep expecting people (especially people who have been through a few chemistry classes) to know.

Soap is a molecule that bonds to water on one end and to grease on the other end. Soap is also basic. This means, it will do the following:

1) Make it possible to rinse grease from an item using water.

2) Suck the water out of living cells, such as bacteria, to the point where they die. It will also do this to your cells, if you touch it.

3) React with acids when in solution. (However, since all acids are water soluble there’s no reason to use it for this purpose unless there is a bizarre emergency.)

Soap is not a magical make-cleaner substance. It will not do the following:

1) Remove ethers (ie, banana smell)

2) Loosen or remove pure carbon residue such as charcoal.

3) React with sugar, gluten, or other random sticky.

In other words, when you are washing something with soap, you only need exactly enough soap to react with the grease. Using more soap will not make it cleaner or clean it faster. Instead, you’ll have to spend extra time rinsing off all the extra soap.

If you are washing something which is not greasy, you only need a tiny bit of soap. Just enough to kill microbes if there are any. So for example, if you are washing a pot that you just used to melt sugar, you do not need any soap at all. The heat will have killed all microbes, and there’s no grease to remove.

When buying dish soap, consider the actual amount of soap in the solution verses the price. If you have the habit of dumping a ton of dish soap into every bowl, buy the cheap stuff. Yes, you’re buying mostly water, but if you paid more for the bottle with a higher concentration of soap, you would still use it up at exactly the same rate, and either use more water or leave bitter residue on your dishes.

If you use it properly, in small dabs on the brush or scrubby thing, go ahead and get the pricier dish soap. The bottle will last longer.