New Screen Protector Fights Germs On Your Phone

Hey germaphobes — I see you over there, isolated from the bacteria-ridden crowd with your face masks and your hand sanitizer and your proud announcements that you hover over the toilet seat when you pee in public (don't you realize that hovering is the problem?!). Listen, I have good news for you: Gorilla Glass has developed the first antimicrobial cover glass for your smart phone! Bad news: it's not available yet, but the substance will be used on the ZTE Axon in China, and if it goes well you just might see it on your iPhone and Galaxy soon, too. Which is a great solution to a problem that isn't so much a problem as a new way retailers are trying to freak you out and convince you you need antimicrobial cell phones. Hooray for capitalism!

Have you been losing a bunch of sleep at night worrying about all the germs living on your phone? Of course you have. You worry about germs on everything, you endearing weirdos. Enter this fancy new screen protector, which works because of ... science.

So science has never been my strong-suit, but based on the video below, it looks like the phone gets covered in gerkin pickle looking germs ("not necessarily your own" the voiceover assures us ominously), but the antimicrobial glass is covered in silver ions that... zap them somehow?

I don't know. I honestly don't even remember what an ion is (but I did remember that the atomic symbol for silver is Ag so... yay science). The fuller explanation can be found in the video below:

Look, I'm not saying germs aren't all over everything. The world is absolutely saturated in germs... it's just that it's supposed to be that way. I mean, obviously you don't want to go rolling around in raw sewage or drinking from Lake Bacteria or sneezing into someone while performing surgery. But unless you're immunocompromised, there's really a limit on how much you should be worrying about this. It can get in the way of some really fabulous things. Like... remember when people were freaking out about poop beards a while ago? Some study was all "ZOMG! HIPSTERS ARE ACTUALLY FULL OF ACTUAL CRAP... AND THEY KEEP IT ALL IN THEIR BEARDS!" And then I was like "Don't you effing dare try to ruin beards for me, jerks! I have waited my entire life for beards to be a cultural thing and they finally are and you can pry them from my cold dead hands." (And then I was totally justified in my rage because it turns out beards aren't even full of poop?)

Is that the kind of world we want to live in? A world where we're scared to bask in the majesty of beards because we fear that they might be inordinately full of poop? And how do we know that all these germs (maybe even the bad ones) aren't actually having some sort of beneficial effect on us over the course of our lives?

Look, you guys go ahead with your silver ion germ zapping phones. Just remember, you guys are Jake Gyllenhaal in the 2001 classic Bubble Boy...

And I'm one of the Ingalls girls running through a sunlit meadow in Little House on the Prairie.

Images: YouTube(4); Giphy(1)