Question

Why does the skin of our fingers shrink when you wash clothes for a long time?

Answer 1

Soap:

• Soaps are the potassium or sodium salts of a carboxylic acid with a long aliphatic chain.
• They are surfactants, which help in the emulsification of oils in water by lowering the surface tension between a liquid and another substance.
• Saponification of fats and oils is commonly used to make soap.
• Examples of soaps: sodium palmitate and sodium stearate

Finger's shrinks in soap solution is due to:

• Soap has a high concentration of solutes and it is a hypertonic solution containing a high concentration of salts.
• As a result, when washing clothes, the concentration of solutes in soap water is higher than in hand cells.
• Because of this, osmosis happens in which the water molecules in the cells of the hand move out into the soap solution.
• This is an osmotic process in which water molecules pass across a semi-permeable membrane from a lower solute concentration to a greater solute concentration, i.e. from dilute solutions to concentrated solutions.
• Therefore, the finger's skin shrinks.