Key Takeaway: When there’s no soap and water available, use a hand sanitizer to clean your hands in the meantime. If you want to avoid any kind of harmful or inebriating chemicals, turn to an all-natural sanitizer – Human Nature’s Spray Sanitizer is one, conveniently packaged in a refillable and very portable 50mL spray-type bottle.

The other day, we began to discuss green and healthy with a post about the habit of hand-washing. Today, we’ll be talking about a product that helps promote this healthy habit in an efficient and environmental way.

Health experts say that there is no substitution to hand-and-soap washing – that is simply the best way to prevent diseases from spreading. However, in a pinch, when you’re really on the go and have no means by which to access water (even if you had soap with you), the next best thing is alcohol or something similar. We usually keep a bottle of ethyl alcohol in each of our cars – and while I love the clinical scent of it that strikes the chord ringing “clean!” in my mind, alcohol can be intoxicating when you’re exposed to it for a long time, and it does make my hands feel dry.

So I bump down to hand sanitizers.

Since I was in high school, I’ve seen the ubiquitous Bath & Body Works hand sanitizers – little bottles in silicon cases that come with a long tail that enabled you to wrap the thing around your bag conveniently. Don’t get me wrong, I love BBW’s scents – my clan always orders tons of their materials and I am used to using their hand soaps in our house or theirs. But since I want to go natural and local, though the option is a little less portable, I go to my de facto personal care provider, and they are far beyond simply satisfactory in this regard.

Human Nature

Ever since its inception a mere seven years ago, Human Nature has prided itself on three P’s it’s pro-: pro-Philippines, pro-people, pro-planet (a matchup coined by our resident illustrator, Kevin Tee). That is, it produces everything in the Philippines (though raw materials are still mainly sourced outside, a practice the company wishes to end as soon as supply is possible), its products are designed to be environmentally- and physiologically-friendly, and it gives extra care to its employees and other grassroots stakeholders.

One of its more popular products, and a personal favorite, is the Spray Sanitizer. One, it’s effective. Two, it smells lovely. Three, it’s all-natural.

The Spray Sanitizer comes in three scents (plus one for kids) – and in nifty 50mL bottles. They’re small enough to fit neatly in your purse or bag, and not too big that they’d flout carry-on baggage policies at airports (anything above 100mL must be discarded or consumed). As the name implies, the bottles are spray-type, and the Spray Sanitizer is as fluid as water, not like the viscous gel-type that BBW offers. The bestselling scent, however, the Citrus Burst, comes in a 200mL bottle also. This is meant for home or office use (think spraying your desk and wiping it clean) – as well as a “refill” station for your travel-sized version when it runs out.

And fragrant the four scents are – I particularly love the soothing yet invigorating scent of the Citrus. They are all phthalate-free – meaning that they are free of synthetic fragrance, which has shown to have a correlation with premature breast development in girls and sexual development of boys.  They’re also free of triclosans, which has been linked to disruption of the endocrine and thus the thyroid. Yet on top of this, the Spray Sanitizer has been proven to kill up to 99.99% of germs, and prevents dryness of skin (which I sometimes get with alcohol) with aloe vera.

I always carry a bottle of HN’s Spray Sanitizer with me wherever I go, and in situations where I need a quick fix, I use it – like before eating if the washroom is not near, or if I got my hands only slightly dirty (washing hands does consume water, and while we are called to be clean, we are also called to practice environmental awareness – and this strikes the fine balance between the two). It’s only slightly taller than a BlackBerry (see the featured photo), and is smaller than many smartphones today. It’s a wise investment in my book – get just one 50mL bottle and simply keep on buying the 200mL bottle to refill and refill. Economy of scale rocks in this case.

Human Nature’s Spray Sanitizer is available at Human Nature outlets and selected supermarkets across the Philippines, as well as in selected places in the USA, UAE, and Singapore. The 50mL size (available in 4 scents) is at Php59.75 (~USD 1.29), while the 200mL size (Citrus Burst only) costs Php189.75 (~USD 4.09) at SRP.

Featured Photo copyright 2015 Allister Roy S. Chua.