Is Dial soap good for tattoos? It is in half the bathrooms in the country and its whole pitch is killing bacteria, which sounds like exactly what an open wound wants. We pulled the FDA drug labels for the Dial Gold bar and for the fragrance-free foaming wash, and the interesting part is not the difference between them. It is what they have in common.
Is Dial soap good for tattoos? The short answer
No. Dial Gold is a scented, dyed, antibacterial bar, and every one of those three words is a reason to leave it in the soap dish for a few weeks. The fragrance-free version is a real improvement and still not what we would pick.
What rules the whole brand out of first place is not marketing. Dial’s hand soaps and bars are filed with the FDA as over-the-counter drugs, and the thing making them a drug is an antiseptic your tattoo has no use for.
Every Dial soap is an antibacterial drug
This is the part that surprises people, because Dial sells the fragrance-free bottle as the gentle option and it reads like a plain soap. It is not one.
What is in Dial Gold
The Drug Facts panel on the gold bar, filed with the FDA by Henkel, gives one active ingredient: benzalkonium chloride at 0.1%, purpose antibacterial. Below that, among the inactives, sit fragrance and four colorants, including Yellow 5 and Red 4.
So the gold bar brings three separate things a broken skin barrier could react to, and the color is doing nothing for you at all. It is a good soap for hands that are intact and a poor one for skin that is not.
What is in the fragrance-free Dial
The fragrance-free foaming hand wash is the one people are usually pointed toward, and it does fix the obvious problem. Dial’s own spec page for it lists no fragrance and no dyes, and the ingredient list is short.
Its active ingredient is benzalkonium chloride at 0.13%, slightly more than the gold bar carries. Cetrimonium chloride, from the same chemical family, appears again further down the inactives. Removing the perfume did not make it a plain soap. It made it an unscented antiseptic.
Why antibacterial is not the feature it looks like
The reason to want Dial on a new tattoo is the antibacterial claim, so it is worth knowing what stands behind it, which is less than the packaging implies.
The FDA’s position is that there is no evidence antibacterial soaps beat plain soap and water for everyday washing. Its 2016 final rule pulled 19 active ingredients, triclosan and triclocarban among them, out of consumer antiseptic washes, because manufacturers could not show they were both safe for long-term daily use and better than plain soap.
Benzalkonium chloride was not one of the 19. It was one of three ingredients the agency deferred from that rule, in the FDA’s words, to allow more time for the studies needed to fill the safety and effectiveness data gaps it had identified. Deferred is not approved. It is a question the agency left open, and it is the ingredient doing the work in every Dial soap on the shelf.
Plain soap and water is what an antibacterial wash has to beat, and it has not. That is the whole argument against paying extra for the antiseptic version while your tattoo heals.
The benzalkonium chloride problem on a healing tattoo
There is a second reason to care about the active ingredient, and it is specific to tattoos rather than to hand washing in general.
Benzalkonium chloride is a long-established skin irritant, and its ability to provoke a genuine allergy has been drawing attention more recently. In March 2025 the journal Contact Dermatitis published a case report titled Benzalkonium Chloride Allergy Mimicking Tattoo Infection, and the sequence in it is worth reading closely.
A 42-year-old woman developed blistering, itchy, eczema-like lesions on her forearm from the first day of a new tattoo there. Her doctor read it as a staph infection and prescribed two weeks of antibiotics, then a second course of ten days when it did not clear. She kept applying an antiseptic containing benzalkonium chloride throughout. The skin only settled once she stopped the antiseptic, and patch testing later came back positive for benzalkonium chloride.
What it does show is worth carrying anyway. A reaction to the antiseptic looked so much like an infection that it was treated as one twice, and the fix was subtraction rather than another product. On skin that is already an open wound, every extra active ingredient is one more thing to rule out if something goes wrong.
What to use instead of Dial on a new tattoo
Use a plain, fragrance-free soap with no active ingredient. That is the entire specification, and it costs less than the antibacterial one.
- Fragrance-free, not “unscented”. Some products labeled unscented still carry a masking fragrance to cover the smell of the base. Perfume sits on the standard patch-test series dermatologists screen suspected reactions against, which is a fair measure of how regularly it is the thing at fault.
- No Drug Facts panel. If the pack carries one, the soap has an active ingredient in it. On a healing tattoo you want the cosmetic soap, not the drug.
- Mild. A syndet bar, a plain glycerin bar or a gentle liquid cleanser, rather than a deodorant bar built around its scent.
- Nothing added. No exfoliants, no essential oils, no tea tree.
The plain fragrance-free swap
Dove Sensitive Skin Beauty Bar, fragrance-free
The point of it here is what the wrapper does not carry: no Drug Facts panel, which means no active ingredient and nothing in the bar with a job beyond washing. It sits on the same drugstore shelf as the Dial at roughly the same money per wash, so swapping for the three weeks your tattoo needs costs you nothing but the walk down the aisle.
That same test is why our write-up on Irish Spring lands on a straight no, and why the Dove range splits into the sensitive bar above and several others you should leave alone, including one that turns out to be an antibacterial drug on the same active as the Dial. Perfume decides those two. Dial is the case where the active ingredient decides it on its own.
If you are staying with Dial anyway
Plenty of people have a bottle already and are not going shopping over this. The fragrance-free foaming hand wash is the one to use, and using it is not a mistake worth losing sleep over.
It drops the perfume and the dyes, which are the two ingredients most likely to cause you trouble, and the foaming pump is genuinely easier to work one-handed when you are trying not to press a fresh tattoo against anything. Rinse it off properly rather than letting it sit.
If you are staying with Dial
Dial fragrance-free antibacterial foaming hand wash
The only Dial worth using on a healing tattoo, with no fragrance and no dyes. It is still an antibacterial product carrying benzalkonium chloride 0.13%, so it is the least bad option in the range rather than a good one. Check the front of the bottle says fragrance free, because most of the line does not.
How to wash a healing tattoo
Which soap you use matters less than how you use it, and the technique below works with any plain fragrance-free cleanser.
- Clean hands before anything else. No exceptions, and no picking up the soap on the way.
- Use lukewarm water, not hot. Hot water dries the skin out faster.
- Work the lather up in your palms and apply it by hand. Fingertips only, and nothing abrasive between them and the ink.
- Rinse fully, then pat dry with a clean paper towel. Do not rub, and do not reuse a bath towel.
- Twice a day is enough. Washing more often adds irritation without adding cleanliness.
Keep the tattoo under a shower and out of standing water until the surface has sealed, which takes the bath, the hot tub, the pool and the ocean off the table for a while. Soaking is what undoes an otherwise careful routine, and since “until it has sealed” is not a date you can put in a calendar, our healing timeline planner works out when swimming comes back on the list from the day you sat down.
Where this advice stops being the answer
Your tattooist knows what they used on you and how their own work heals. If their aftercare sheet contradicts anything here, theirs is the one to go by.
Washing is also only half the routine. Once the tattoo reaches the dry, flaking stage, what you put on afterward matters as much as what you wash with, and our look at Aveeno for tattoos goes through which product in that range is fragrance-free on the label rather than only in the advertising.
The verdict on Dial for tattoos
Dial soap is not a good choice for a healing tattoo. Dial Gold combines fragrance, dyes and an antiseptic, and even the fragrance-free version keeps benzalkonium chloride as its active ingredient, which the FDA has neither cleared nor shown to beat plain soap. A cosmetic fragrance-free bar does the same job with nothing extra to react to.
FAQ
Can you use Dial soap on a new tattoo?
You can, and the fragrance-free version will not usually cause a problem, but it is not the best available choice. Every Dial hand soap and bar carries benzalkonium chloride as an antibacterial active ingredient, and a plain fragrance-free soap cleans a healing tattoo just as well with one fewer ingredient to react to.
Is Dial Gold bar soap bad for tattoos?
It is the worst option in the Dial range for this job. The gold bar’s label lists fragrance and four colorants among its inactive ingredients, on top of the benzalkonium chloride active, so it brings three separate irritant classes to skin that is still an open wound.
Is antibacterial soap better for a healing tattoo?
No. The FDA’s position is that antibacterial washes have not been shown to work better than plain soap and water, which is why its 2016 rule removed 19 active ingredients from consumer products. Clean skin comes from washing gently and rinsing properly, not from the antiseptic in the bottle.
Does Dial make a fragrance-free soap?
Yes, a fragrance-free foaming hand wash, sold under the Complete, Clean + Gentle and Antibacterial and Sensitive names depending on the retailer. It has no fragrance and no dyes, though it is still an antibacterial product with benzalkonium chloride 0.13% as its active ingredient.
Can Dial soap fade tattoo ink?
Washing with it will not fade healed ink. The risk during healing is irritation rather than fading, and irritation matters because scratching or over-drying a tattoo that is still peeling is what pulls pigment out and leaves patchy spots.
When can I go back to using Dial after a tattoo?
Once the tattoo has sealed over and finished peeling. For most people that lands somewhere around the two or three week mark. Intact skin handles fragrance and antiseptics far better than broken skin does, so the whole objection disappears at that point.