With all the buzz about germs these days, even the most hygienically lax of us have begun giving second thoughts to our cleanliness—soaping up for at least fifteen seconds, coughing into our elbows, and using antibacterial gel every time we enter a new room. There are endless opportunities to sterilize and re-sterilize, and it seems that we intend to use all of them as often as humanly possible. We’re nothing if not clean at this point, right? Well, true for our hands, but what about one of those other appendages we women use just as much—our purse?
Purses are practically a body part. They’re with us absolutely everywhere we go. Yet, I’m the first to admit, we rarely take the time to make sure their clean-factor is up to par with the rest of our body parts.
The Life of a Handbag
From the seat next to us on the subway to the bathroom floor (I know, I know, there was no hook), our purses often find themselves sitting in the dirtiest of dirty places. Yet instead of super sanitizing them like we would our hands if they touched the floor of that smelly dive bar, we simply pick them back up and forge onward with our lives, spreading the germs they pick up through our cars, homes, and even the tables on which we eat.
Karen Weaver, an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles, cringes when I ask her about where her purse has been: “Oh my gosh, I have it on the classroom floor, the floor of the bathroom stall, and often the floor of the gym if I work out after work,” she says. “And that’s just in one day.”
It Is As Bad As You Think
Okay, so we know how disgusting these places are, but what effect do they actually have on our handbags? CBS did a special report on the germs lurking on the outsides of purses, and their findings were seriously traumatizing.
Microbiologists tested samples from hundreds of purse bottoms and they found some level of bacteria on every single bag—about a quarter had bacteria counts in the tens of thousands—including pseudomona, staphylococccus aureus, E. coli, and salmonella. In one sampling, four out of five purses tested positive for salmonella.
