The gross reason you should skip using electric hand dryers

Electric hand dryers are eco-friendly — but may hide a dirty secret.

In an effort to save the environment, public restrooms have begun offering electric hand dryers in place of paper towels, but a shocking video might prove it’s all for naught.

Dryers actually harvest bacteria from the bathroom — perhaps the last place you’d want the microorganisms to come from — which is then transmitted onto hands, according to a shocking video and research conducted by an amateur scientist.

That means that after washing your hands to cleanse away germs, electric dryers may just be making them filthy all over again.

While Dallin Lewis is a digital content creator and not a professional researcher, the 33-year-old conducted his own experiment by placing petri dishes underneath hand dryers in various public restrooms, he told South West News Service.

After letting the bacteria marinate in an incubator, the Provo, Utah, resident compared his collected samples with a control dish that was meant to mimic someone’s hands air-drying without the use of the air blower.

While the control test — or air-drying method — showed no bacteria growth, he discovered noticeable white patches on the petri dishes that were held under electric hand dryers, indicating substantial bacteria growth.

A shocking video he filmed in June showed just how gross it was, with bacteria growth able to be seen with the naked eye.

“I knew they would be bad, but I was in no way expecting the level I saw,” Lewis told SWNS. “I have done many similar bacteria growth tests on a variety of surfaces — phones and gas pumps are probably some of the worst, but the hand dryer was so bad though!”

In fact, his research went so far as to suggest hand dryers recontaminate hands with so much grime that washing them in the first place was entirely pointless.

A 2021 study published in Cambridge University Press’ Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology journal supports Lewis’ evidence of the ick factor of dryers, proving that hand-drying jets indeed allow more bacterial contamination than paper towels.

The researchers discovered hand dryers could potentially transfer germs to surfaces and clothing, which was tracked in the study in a hospital setting.

“Bacteriophage dispersal across hospital surfaces was more frequently detected after hands were dried using a jet air dryer than using paper towels,” the study authors wrote. “On average, the levels of contamination were 10-fold higher following jet air dryer use than after paper towel use.”

But this isn’t the first time the hand jets have been hung out to dry.

A 2019 study looked at the noise of hand dryers, finding that the volume at which they operate could even be harmful to children’s ears. A 13-year-old scientific prodigy conducted the study, which was later published in the Canadian journal Paediatrics & Child Health, and proved the dryers’ noises could be damaging.

“My loudest measurement was 121 decibels from a Dyson Airblade model,” Nora Keegan, the eighth-grade student who conducted the study, told NPR. “And this is not good because Health Canada doesn’t allow toys for children to be sold over 100 decibels, as they know that they can damage children’s hearing.”