Should I take my engagement ring off every time I wash my hands?

The biggest risk of removing a ring every time you wash your hands is not actually losing it down the drain, though that does happen. The more common failure is leaving the ring on a bench, in a hotel basin or on a public restroom shelf and walking away without it. Each removal is one more opportunity to forget it. Bathroom drains catch a meaningful share of lost rings, but bench-top forgetting accounts for more. Keeping the ring on through hand washing trades a tiny amount of soap residue (which a weekly clean handles anyway) for a meaningful reduction in loss risk over the lifetime of the ring.

There are situations where the ring should come off even for hand washing. Public restrooms with shallow basins and exposed plug drains are the highest-risk environment, since a slipped ring goes straight down. Pre-surgical scrubbing in a healthcare setting requires removing all jewellery for sterility reasons. Heavy-duty industrial soaps with strong solvents or pumice grit need to stay off the ring. For ordinary household soap and tap water the soap film is the only consequence, and it cleans off in the weekly soak. The simplest rule is to leave the ring on for routine washing at home and take it off in unfamiliar bathrooms or for any cleaning beyond water and soap.