Hasta La Creative!

The Food and Drug Administration today finalized a rule to ban key ingredients from antibacterial hand and body wash products including triclosan and trilocarban though marketers have a year to comply and there are a handful of remaining antibacterial ingredients they may be able to keep using later.

“Consumers may think antibacterial washes are more effective at preventing the spread of germs, but we have no scientific evidence that they are any better than plain soap and water,” said Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in a statement. “In fact, some data suggests antibacterial ingredients may do more harm than good over the long term.”

This doesn’t mean “antibacterial” soaps will be going away anytime soon. For one thing, the FDA essentially said all soap is antibacterial, giving marketers seeming leeway to keep using the term regardless of removing the ingredients. And when Colgate reformulated Palmolive Ultra-Antibacterial dish soap in 2011, it said it was making the formula better, and it currently uses a range of ingredients, including alcohol and salt, that don’t appear on the FDA list of banned or potential banned ingredients.

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