If you’ve ever taken a shower with sodium or potassium chloride water softener, you know what I mean. Until you get used to it, you don’t know when the soap film’s gone because your skin is so sleek (okay, slimy).
What causes the slime? 
The “slime” is clean skin without the film left behind by soap and “hard” water.
Now, this doesn’t match with my personal experience, so I’d like to see an answer to this as well. Like the OP, I feel “slimy” when I take a shower at relatives’ houses, who have well water with perhaps some sort of water softener. I don’t feel slimy when I take a shower using water from the municipal supply in various big cities. My understanding is that the city water will have less solutes of all sorts, and thus have “soft” water. What’s going on here?
Una’s staff report: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mhardwater.html
So maybe different people are feeling a different “slime”? It sounds like in hard water, you get an insoluble precipitate, which is what I feel as “slime”. But in soft water, you can feel skin oils, which is what people accustomed to hard water feel as “slime”.
When the softening rate is set too high, a greasy skin feeling will result.
Can you explain what you mean by “over softening”? Either all the calcium and magnesium are exchanged for sodium, or in some cases potassium, or it’s not. It’s not like the water is flowing through the brine tank and dissolving extra salt along the way. The resin bed exchanges calcium ions for sodium ions. How do you over soften?
Thanks,** Muffin**.
The article seems to nail it.
I don’t know. Last time we covered this, I never really got a straight answer. When I shower, I want to get the natural oils (and dirt and grime) off my skin and have a fresh start. When I shower in soft water, I of course get that slimy feel. When I shower in harder water than I’m used to, it almost feels tannic. In soft water, if I scrape or dry hard enough, I get that nasty feeling off. Water enough doesn’t do it. So my question is, if soft water really makes me cleaner, than what am I scraping off, and why don’t I have to scrape it off in harder water?
Your scraping off the oils present on your skin. When you use hard water the oils are still present you just can’t feel them do to the hardness and soap residue left on you from the shower.
Makes it a bitch to feel dry while towelling off, too.
See, I don’t buy that. That implies that the soap residue is an impenetrable shield. Soap residue should act like oil, you know, brush it away, and underneath is the oily skin. Soap is a water wettener. Even in hard water, the soap bonds the water with the oil, and so your skin shouldn’t be oily.
I don’t know either. If soft water leaves the oil on your skin, what else must it be leaving? Obviously, the oil never got separated from your flesh, so what manner of dirt or bacteria could be hiding in it or under it?
Well, I don’t know about all you hard water freaks 
but I have always lived with naturally soft water and when we visit relatives in the northern US, their hard water leaves a mineral residue on my hair and skin that makes it feel coarse and icky. I’d have a hard time living somewhere with hard water.
From reading the setup instructions furnished with water softening equipment, they direct the user to set the softener based upon a previously completed water analysis, paying attention to the grains of hardness, IIRC.
When people have complained about the slimy feeling, I’ve advised them to either get a water analysis done and adjust their softener accordingly, or reduce the setting a little bit every few days until the feeling if alleviated.
A softener is charged with an amount of sodium needed to bring it back to 100% charged. The amount of sodium required is based on the waters hardness.
A softner removes all hardness or it doesn’t there isn’t a middle ground. If you wanted water that is partially softened you’d need to do so by adjusting a bypass valve around the equipment.
Bingo! This IS the correct answer! Many posters above have forgotten some basic chemistry! All alkalines (high pH over 7) have a slippery feel to them. Surfactants (liquid soaps) are one example. Simply put, when water feels “slimey”, the water is over-loaded with the molecules from the softener. Hence, you are no longer feeling pure water, but the solution itself.
Water softening companies fail to tell you this. Your well water pH can change, but the water softening people NEVER re-test and monitor your system. After heavy rains, my well’s low pH of 4 (i.e., very acidic) changed to a pleasant level. But, the dang water softening people still try to sell me whatever they can. So, you should periodically test your water’s pH (both upstream and downstream of the water softening unit, if possible). Go to a pool store and buy a water sample testing kit. I like the test strips better than adding drops to a water sample for the colors are a little easier to read on the scale on the back of the box of strips.
FYI: I wanted to see how accurate these strips were, so I took an upstream water sample (from a nipple delivering pure well water) and a downstream water sample (from the closest tap)…plus the strips themselves…to a lab run by a friend, and we tested my results against his very accurate, very sensitive digital pH probe. Turns out, the strips were as accurate as one could read the color scale. (Note: Color scales assume you are not color blind.)
And now you know, the rest of the story.
- Jinx
Seems like a good market for these companies to get into, i.e., automatically maintain a certain pH level rather than just over-soften.
Very cogent post, Jinx. Thank you.
I checked amazon.com for test strips and they offer just one brand…
Put me in that group that loathes “soft” water, or at least artificially “softened” water. The purpose of soap and water is to get crud off your skin, and “soft” water and soap with moisturizer always leave me feeling slimy. I wind up wasting a huge amount of water trying to wash all this sliminess off my hands.
“Soft” water and soap with moisturizer are two things that always seem to go together - you rarely see one in a home without the other. I can only assume that some people just like walking around all day feeling slimy…sorry, “soft”. Bleagh!
My brother the Master Plumber hates water softeners with a passion. They eat water heaters. If there’s a water softener in the system, he knows he can pull out the dip tube (a pipe in the middle of the unit that conveys the incoming cold water to the bottom of the heater) and find it eaten away to a nub by water looking to replace the minerals that have been stripped away by the softener.